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Systems of Placement‹ Online Placement | Writing Placement | Successful programs › Placement measures a student’s readiness for instruction and on that basis assigns the student a point of entry within a curricular sequence. Post-secondary writing placement operates at various points in a student’s course of studies. Testing may assign students to a basic, regular, or honors course on admission to college (“entry proficiency exam”), or require more coursework at the end of the first writing course (“first-year course exit exam”), at the 60 credit hour point (“rising junior exam”), on acceptance into a major (“qualifying exam”), or as part of degree completion (“graduation exit exam”). This page will discuss only the first, entry placement testing. In the USA, matriculation writing-placement systems are of long vintage, some more than a century old, some older than the courses they still support. In 1874 for the first time in their entrance examinations Harvard University asked students to show writing proficiency by composing a short essay (read by teachers), and ten years of poor performance on it finally prompted the establishment of the first freshman composition courses as we now know it. Since then many systems of writng placement have been tried. • Essay written by the student and read by English department teachers, sometimes by teachers across campus.
• Essay written by the student and read by a teacher of the target course, who sometimes accepts or rejects the student into his or her course.
• Essay written by the student and read and scored by a certifying agency or testing firm outside the university, the score then used by the university to place the student.
• Essay written by the student and scored by computer software (e.g., Educational Testing Service’s E-rater, ACT’s e-Write, College Board’s WritePlacer), which score is used to place the student.
• Folder or portfolio of the student’s high-school writing submitted and read by faculty to place.
• Short-answer or bubblesheet test taken by the student, on which evidence of “verbal skill”—criterion-referenced score or norm-referenced percentile—the student is placed (“indirect testing”).
• Placement by the student herself or himself in the writing sequence, the decision based on information provided by the college, such as high-school GPA in English courses, scores on a writing or verbal examination, average success of test groups in variouis courses (“informed self-placement”).
• Placement by the student himself or herself using the same kind of information but also relying on advice from counselors (“directed self-placement”).
• Enrollment of all students in the regular writing course, but after a few weeks some students are placed into a more basic course or or given the added requirement of hours in a writing center, the decision made by their teacher or by a panel of faculty on evidence of course performance up to that point.
• Delay of enrollment in writing courses, with possible requirement of a first-year writing course on recommendation from teachers of other courses taken during the first semester or first quarter.
Variants and combinations of these systems are not unusual. ‹ Online Placement | Writing Placement | Successful programs › |