Diagnostic Writing Service - Teachers Resources [Mission Statement]

Using the Diagnostic Writing Service with Your Students

The Diagnostic Writing Service offers your students the opportunity to learn how the writing they currently produce relates to the proficiency standards set for entering freshmen by the UC and CSU systems. The service allows students to write essays to prompts that have actually been used on the CSU's English Placement Test (EPT) and on the UC's Subject A Examination; in response, students receive an overall evaluation of their work and descriptive comments chosen by a reader who actually scores EPT or Subject A essays. The four overall evaluations--"strong," "adequate," "developing competence," and "inadequate"--measure students' work against standards for entering university freshmen, not their own grade levels.

Because the DWS measures students' work against standards for students entering the university, it is probably most appropriate to use the service with eleventh graders. Students who are younger are likely to be too far from meeting university standards for the experience to be anything but discouraging. Eleventh graders, on the other hand, are likely to be close enough to college to experience some success and satisfaction in their writing, but also far enough away from higher education to have real motivation and opportunity to use the descriptive comments to build their skills. Teachers who have used the service in the early pilot stages find that the comments chosen by university readers tend to reinforce their own judgments. In addition, because these comments come from university readers, students often take them more seriously than they do similar comments from teachers or peers.

There are some special considerations in using Subject A prompts in the DWS. Unlike EPT prompts, Subject A prompts are based on substantial reading passages; these passages are chosen to represent the level of reading difficulty that students encounter in freshmen courses at UC. Depending on when they use the DWS, students may be as much as two years younger--and therefore considerably less experienced as readers and writers--than the students for whom the Subject A exam is constructed. Further, in an actual administration students have two hours to read the Subject A passage and to draft, write, and review, their essays. As a result, students writing Subject A essays in the DWS need conditions that will give them the best opportunity to approach the task constructively. Although students can respond to an EPT prompt in a single 50-minute class period, asking them to respond to a Subject A prompt in the same way is likely to produce only anxiety and frustration.

How, then, might teachers use the Subject A prompts in their classes? Here are some possibilities:

have students read and write in a specially--arranged two-hour block, possibly in a school library or computer lab.
have students read and write in two or three consecutive class periods.
allow students to read and discuss the passage in class, then write without time limits at home.
distribute the passage to be read as homework, then have students read the essay topic and write in class the next day or two.

Other variations are possible.

However these Subject A essays are produced, their readers will respond to them using the standards and expectations they have for essays produced by entering UC students in two hours. Because some students may spend significantly more than two hours reading, thinking and writing, they may do somewhat better than they would in an actual Subject A administration. Nevertheless, the reader’s response will be valuable even for these students, giving them an idea of how their best work compares to UC standards and expectations for the reading and writing of entering freshmen.

The fact that overall responses are based on four broad categories of competence relative to standards for entering freshmen leads to a second caution. While students and teachers who use the EPT or Subject A prompts in the DWS may find it desireable to use it more than one time during the process of developing writing skills, it should be noted that doing so within the same academic year may not result in more favorable feedback

Why not? With the DWS using only four broad "overall" categories keyed to a university freshmen's standard of competence, only the truly exceptional student will shift from one category to another during one single academic year. Furthermore, even the comments chosen for the two essays are likely to be similar, even if there's been improvement. For example, if a student's first essay has seven sentence fragments and the second has four, the comment about sentence fragments will almost certainly be chosen both times, even though the second essay is clearly less flawed than the first. Both student and teacher might interpret the fact that the two sets of feedback were very similar to mean that there'd been no growth, but the lack of change is a result of the response system's purpose: to identify areas of strength and weakness, in relationship to university standards, not to measure short-term improvement.

This is not to say that a writing curriculum might not profitably give students the opportunity to respond more than one EPT or Subject A prompt (or to more than one EPT-or Subject A-like writing task). This might best be done as part of a classroom's normal work, however. The DWS should be reserved for those occasions when the judgment of the university reader will be uniquely informative or motivating.