About the Placement Exam

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An initial placement exam is designed to

1) identify students as fulfilling an agreed-upon set of criteria for writing competency, and

2) serve as a microcosm of the kind of writing that is expected in the Writing Program in order to get a sense of how a student will perform.

At NU, we use what is called direct assessment—that is, judging and ranking an actual piece of writing, as opposed to indirect assessment, such as administering grammar tests or objective tests about writing. We use a method known as “holistic scoring,” which is a guided procedure for sorting or ranking written pieces in which a reader reads a paper for an overall impression of the whole piece (the sum rather than any individual part). We read and discuss sample essays that serve as “controls” (i.e., standards by which to judge) in order to achieve consistent rankings.

Holistic scoring of writing-on-demand is accurate but labor-intensive. Holistic assessment

is reliable;

emphasizes what is right rather than what is wrong with a piece of writing;

requires consensus among readers;

establishes criteria for judging by the readers themselves;

encourages ongoing evaluation of a writing program.

Criteria for Reading Diagnostic Essays

Does the paper show evidence that the writer has addressed the writing assignment? Does the paper engage with the assigned text? Does the paper show evidence of comprehension?

The average writer demonstrates a good, though not necessarily perfect, understanding of the writing task. An average writer’s paper demonstrates a somewhat balanced and coherent response.

A basic writer’s paper may not address the assignment at all, or demonstrates a misunderstanding of the assignment.

Does the paper carry out a coherent project?

The average writer’s paper may stumble or seem fuzzy or or undeveloped in spots (it is, after all, a first-draft response to a writing-on-demand assignment), but overall there is a discernable theme and deliberate approach to it. The points raised in the paragraphs of the paper’s body elaborate on the points raised, and fit with its introduction and conclusion.

The basic writer’s paper, in contrast, may feel seriously underdeveloped, unfocused, or both. There may be a lack of sustained discussion of points raised, and what discussion there is seems thin and/or drifts away from those points.

Is the paper an essay, that is, a prose discussion structured in the service of ideas?

A better-than-average writer makes an effort to break out of the constraints and predictability of the five-paragraph theme—for example, by complicating the assignment’s questions, or by raising further issues on the basis of an initial argument and its support. A better-than-average writer may extrapolate to other readings and/or experiences in ways that do more than simply add more “support” to an initial claim.

The average writer may write a predictable essay, the “five paragraph theme,” but it is recognizably an essay. The paper uses specific references, quotations, or anecdotes to illustrate (but probably not complicate) the paper's main idea(s).

The basic writer may announce a topic in the paper’s introduction, but then the paper may get “stuck” either at a very high level of generalization or at the level of narration. The paper may be structured for the most part not so much by a series of related ideas (“points”) as by, say, a long narrative, an emotional reaction, or simply a list of barely related points.

Do the errors in the paper seem unusual for beginning undergraduate writing?

Many undergraduate students make errors, but not of the same kinds or amounts. The average writer’s paper may have errors such as misspellings of difficult words (the exam is written without the help of a dictionary or spell checker) or homonyms (its/it’s), or uncertain or incorrect uses of commas (for example, to hook together closely related sentences where we might use a semicolon). But these errors do not strike us as odd, nor are they so numerous that they seriously interfere with the reader's efforts to process the paper.

The basic writer’s paper may have odd or “buggy” errors (“The photographs resemble sights in which people can relate to . . .”), and/or a number of places where the writing seems confusing and hard to follow because of garbled syntax. Overall, the level of error in the paper as a whole may seriously interfere with the reader's efforts to process the paper.

A note on diagnostic essays written by students for whom English is not their first or strongest language.

Non-native speakers and writers who need more help with their writing may have many of the same problems that basic writers have, but such problems are often more profound and more numerous. In addition, non-native speakers and writers often have difficulties with number, agreement, tenses, articles, vocabulary, and diction that seem not to follow any particular pattern (although sometimes one can indeed discern distinct patterns), but seem random, almost unexplainable, in the context of the grammar handbook.