It has been suggested that the standardized growth curve (SGC) method can be used to accurately determinate equivalent dose (D e ) and reduce measurement time. However, different opinions regarding the applicability of the SGC method exist. In this paper, we evaluated quartz OSL SGCs of marine and coastal sediments of different grain sizes and different cores in the south Bohai Sea in China, and tested their applicability to the determination of D e values. Our results suggested as follows: (1) The SGC method is applicable to both multiple-and single-aliquot regenerative-dose (MAR and SAR) protocols of OSL dating and efficiently provides reliable estimates of D e . (2) Finesand quartz of different palaeodoses showed highly similar dose-response curves and an SGC was developed, but old samples using the SGC method have large uncertainties. (3) For coarse-silt quartz, two different types of dose-response curves were recorded: low-dose (≤60Gy) and high-dose (≥100Gy). The growth curves of low-dose quartz were similar to each other, facilitating the use of SGC in D e estimations, but errors tended to be larger than those obtained in the SAR method. For high-dose (100-300Gy) quartz, the SGC was also found to be reliable, but there was large uncertainty in D e (>300Gy) estimation. We suggest that SGC could be employed for the dating of marine and coastal sediments dating using either MAR or SAR OSL protocol and either fine-silt, coarse-silt or fine-sand quartz.