DEVELOPMENT OF THE UC ANALYTICAL WRITING PLACEMENT EXAMINATION AND THE UNIFORM SCORING STANDARDS

Each year a new UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam is developed. Beginning the summer before the May administration, four faculty members from the University's writing and ESL programs find several passages that seem promising as stimuli for writing, and draft essay topics. After considerable review, the four faculty members decide which new exercises are sufficiently promising to be pre-tested. Usually seven or eight out of about twenty are selected.

This faculty team sends these new exercises to the chair of the AWPE Committee, who arranges for the new exercises to be pre-tested early in fall term writing classes on several UC campuses. Students in these classes -- in ESL courses, courses satisfying the Entry Level Writing Requirement, and courses with the ELWR as a prerequisite -- write essays to the new exercises, and fill in a brief questionnaire critiquing the passage and the topic.

The faculty team reviews a sample of these essays at a fall meeting and recommends to the UC Analytical Writing Placement Examination Committee exercises that resulted in well-written responses, and which most students in the pretest understood and liked. The faculty team then reviews a large number of the pretest essays. They consider how well the student writers understood the passage, what they had to say in response to the topic, and whether the essays written by students who had not yet satisfied the UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam requirement were clearly distinguishable from the essays of students who had satisfied the requirement. As a result of their independent review of the writing exercises, the UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam Committee recommends to the University Committee on Preparatory Education (UCOPE) the three or four exercises which they believe are ready to be administered.

At its December meeting, UCOPE, the Academic Senate body responsible for the UC Analytical Writing Placement Examination and the Entry Level Writing Requirement, makes the final choice of the examination question to be administered the following May.

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