Who Are We?

The Chronicle has an article on the community college's identity crisis.

On Teaching/Assessing Timed Writing

A few posts back clc raised the vexed issue of timed writing for discussion. By suggesting how it invites formulaic expression from most and often handicaps ESL students, she concludes rightly that it may be less helpful than exit portfolios for accurate writing assessment. She's wise to question how well such writing fits our teaching, as we know mostly from helping disparate students with drafting in the real world.

But come next March that world may start affecting us all somewhat more than it does now. For students taking the new SAT will have to write a new, twenty-five-minute essay for college entrance or placement. The requirement may even affect transfers — a prospect putting timed writing, I think, directly on our agenda.

Although I can't begin to describe the new test (you can perhaps read about it at The College Board or Time), I can add a bit about essay scoring. A while back Jocalo addressed that work in his SAT, Multiple Choice Tests and Writing Assessment. Like him I've had years of experience in scoring essays, first for the ECT (English Composition Test) and then the SAT II, and over the years in doing so I've come to regard scoring as at least usefully predictive. I know senior colleges do, since upper-end marks are the best general indicators of college success. Having given my own students such tests, I know they can rise to the challenge, particularly with careful coaching.

Partly to aid such work, I have thought to link the current SAT II scoring guide and sample essays from the College Board. How the new SAT guide will look I don't know, but it will probably be similar. Beyond grammatical correctness, the key is mostly substantive development, marking the truth of E. B. White's dictum: "Facts have an eloquence all their own."

What Kind of Writing Really Matters?

One of the endless debates in my department is whether it is important that students be able to write an essay in class in a timed situation as an exit requirement for basic and freshman composition courses. As a true believer in portfolios, and in the notion that in the "real world" writers write over time and with the feedback of readers, I put much less importance on this form of writing than most of my colleagues. In my experience, timed, in-class writing exams end up telling me what I already know: that students for whom English is a second language will fare far worse grammatically than their native-speaking classmates and that nearly all students will write the safest, most formulaic essay in terms of content that they can.

I'm curious to know whether others out there are using in-class essays as an exit requirement and if so, to what extent issues like grammatical correctness are considered.

Let Us Entertain You

An excerpt from Mark Edmunson's book Why Read? on how students have changed because of computers. Interesting read.