A major challenge for first-year students is the demands on academic writing. The purpose of the study is to identify students' difficulties with writing at the beginning of their education to contribute to the discussion about how students' writing development can be supported. The overall theoretical perspective is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The data consists of texts from the first examination of a primary teacher program. The analysis includes partly a corpus analysis of 125 texts concerning sentence length, word length, the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile, and partly a qualitative text analysis of a selection of eleven students' texts from the larger group concerning text cohesion, composition and use of references. The results indicate that the task design is of great importance for how advanced the students' texts are, based on the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile. Furthermore, students struggle with paragraph division and creating clear relationships between and within paragraphs to create coherent texts. The results also show that the students need support to develop their ability to write from sources. Based on the results, the authors discuss how subject teachers in higher education can support students' writing development.