Colleges don't need a new standardized writing exam, claims the Southeastern Missourian:
...is there a need to better test college students' writing skills?
The College Board, which administers the SAT tests, insists it's needed and that mandatory testing will prompt students to be better writers. A 2003 report by a national commission says poor writing skills are found at all levels of education, from elementary school to college.
But many of the schools that rely on the ACT exams, including Southeast Missouri State University, don't see a need for a new college-entrance writing test. Only 17 percent of some 2,000 four-year colleges and universities have told ACT officials that they plan to require applicants to their schools to submit writing test scores beginning in fall 2006.
Southeast admissions director Debbie Below said the Cape Girardeau school already has its own writing assessment program and Southeast won't make prospective students spend additional money to take another ACT exam.
It appears that schools are not so much relaxed about writing as they are more anxious about other subjects:
Despite the new emphasis on writing, a spokesman for the Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT says skill with words is not the biggest failing of incoming college freshmen.
"Science and math are the problems," said Ken Gullette of ACT.
A study of ACT scores shows that 68 percent of test-takers nationwide who graduated from high school this spring already have the academic skills to earn a C or higher in college freshman English classes.
In contrast, only 40 percent of them are academically prepared to earn a C or higher in algebra, and only 26 percent are prepared to earn a C or higher in college biology, Gullette said.
Emphasis mine. According the Missouri Department of Secondary Education home page, the MAP requires Missouri students to know Algebra. I think. The homepage is confusing, and the math framework page is even more so. Page 59 finally gets around to mentioning some concrete examples, but it's hard to tell just how much algebra is tested at the high school level.
Anyway, some Missouri colleges say they have their own writing assessments, but the matter-of-fact description of why just about curls my hair:
Bratton said some colleges like Southeast [Missouri State] require new students to take a writing test to determine what freshman English course students must take. Others determine course placement on the basis of the ACT score on the English part of the exam...
Jon Thrower, who also teaches English composition as a graduate student, said some Southeast students do have difficulty crafting a sentence. Sometimes students leave out verbs or subjects and resort to sentence fragments in their essays, he said.
Reinheimer said 400 to 450 students out of 1,600 to 1,800 new students tested at the start of a school year are found to have problems writing essays. That doesn't surprise him.
"There are always going to be people who don't write very well," he said.
Funny, but I don't remember there always being college students who could not write in complete sentences.
Posted by kswygert at October 13, 2004 03:51 PM