Looking at other students assignments is fine. Although I would advise you do it after you go out and try to shoot your assignment. I don’t want other people’s mistakes to get in the way of your learning…
I like what you tried to do with this photograph. Using a polarizing filter is a good choice in this situation because it will remove most of the reflections that can get in the way.
As you mentioned you we’re having trouble shooting in such harsh conditions. If thats the case you can also add a Neutral Density filter. Of course another reason you could have been having trouble with this is because your ISO was set to 800. ISO 800 would be good for a dark or low light situation. In other words not this. In this case your ISO should be as low as possible. Like ISO 100… Cranking up your ISO to 800 increases the sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. That is great for low light because your sensor needs to be more sensitive as there is less light… However in this case there is too much light.
Having your ISO set this high introduces noise/grain as well. Take a look at a 100% crop of your image:
[attachment=0:277dgty6]ISO-800-noise.jpg[/attachment:277dgty6]
You can see the noise / grain…
Beyond that the most important thing here is to get you to use filters. You’ve done that so good on ya mate! (as they say in Australia) You will find that you need filters more and more over time as your photography improves and you refine your craft.
One final note on this image is that the little berries feel a little odd from a composition standpoint. I think it’s that they feel like they should be the label of the bottle or something. Except that they’re overlapping on one of the edges. (just below the red circle to the right in the image above)
In any case choosing a different composition would have improved this image. For instance aligning the berries such that they are centered on the bottle as if they we’re a label. Just an idea and this is subjective territory…