Evan Dossey, a 2012 graduate, was generally successful with writing assignments until he took the Writing Proficiency Exam.
Dossey found out he failed his second Writing Proficiency Exam after he graduated. His diploma was withheld until he could complete and pay $500 to enroll in the four-week Writing Proficiency course. Unlike full-time students, the alumni had to pay per course hour.
The Writing Proficiency Exam, which became a graduation requirement in 1984, involves a two to three-page essay with a two-hour time limit. The exam asks students to choose an article and study it in preparation for a prompt they will not see until the day of the exam.
As is the case with every student who takes the exam, Dossey’s performance hinged upon the response of two essay readers.
“The exam is graded in a way that tries to reduce writing ability to a measurable science,” Dossey said. “But there is inherent subjectivity in any analysis of writing. For every two readers who thought my essay was a failure, one may have thought it was effective.”
Paul Ranieri, an associate professor of English, also questions the exam’s validity. While he believes the comprehensive method of grading gives reliable results, he does not think that the test best reflects a student’s general writing ability.
“Writing is a lifelong, ever-evolving process,” Ranieri said. “How students write now probably isn’t going to be how they write one, five, 10, 20 years from now.”
However, Ranieri does not completely deny that the exam is important.
“A positive offshoot of a test like this is that it sends the message that writing is important,” Ranieri said. “But I think there are many better ways to send that message.”
While talking about measuring students’ writing ability, Ranieri pulled out a stack of folders from his shelf — portfolios brimming with writing samples spanning a few students’ careers at Ball State. Ranieri is the director of the Honors Writing Program, which evaluates students’ portfolios in addition to their performance on an impromptu essay like the one on the Writing Proficiency Exam. Like the Honors Writing Program, Ranieri said the proficiency essay needs a fuller body of work to accompany it to best represent students’ writing ability.
“People treat writing like a tetanus shot: one shot and you’re good for a long time,” Ranieri said. “One could argue that the Writing Proficiency Exam encourages that kind of ‘let’s get this over with’ attitude.”
In his view, effective writing comes from certain contexts and conditions that the proficiency program does not provide.
“All of us have battlefield writing skills,” Ranieri said. “I’ve written important notes, emails and memos in half an hour. But in every case like that, I would benefit from more time. This exam asks students to write with a set of battlefield skills that is not adaptable to every situation.”
“Battlefield” is an apt term to describe the kind of environment for which the Writing Proficiency Program intends to prepare students.
“We could give students more time to develop and write the response on the exam, but lots of places in life will require them to think more quickly,” said Marilyn Buck, associate provost.
Buck said the exam is less a measure of general writing ability than a test of critical thinking.
Not much has changed since the exam was put into place and no foreseeable changes are in the future. Yet professors like Ranieri say that the individual impact the exam has on students such as Dossey should be questioned, while other professors such as Buck stand by the exam’s stated objective to “provide an appropriate assessment of undergraduate student writing.”
“Nothing is further from the truth: not for upper-level classes, undergraduate or graduate, not for writing in real life, not for writing in a profession,” Ranieri said.
Writing proficiency program director Anna Priebe told the Daily News she would not comment on the criticism aimed at the Writing Proficiency Exam.
