and C omm/miralion ;ldren,q Rmarrb in (/7! -died in some business .- problems. Often. the idinon. sortie business knowledge. has never -rsona which is to be Btmrim (Chicago. IL: 0213 in which they will 11 Council of Teachers Writing and Changes “i. EDRS Document 80:. ed. B. Anderson we Ratings of Writing ii on Measurement in ibers to suggest omes Associate ,-cretary; Execu- ee (three open- mbers are wel- itory letters of 3 Chair of the -borough Com- CCC members e to attend an in Thursday 17 n Resolutions. nation at the ist five CCCC solutions. with it“. do NCTE. Testing Proficiency in Writing at San Francisco State University Sara Warshauer Freedman and William S. Robinson At San Francisco State University, we have been involved in testing our stu- dents’ proficiency in written composition since 1960. long before the current proficiency movement gained momentum. Through our years of experience, we have learned how to design a reasonably reliable, reasonably economical testing program capable of handling large populations of students semester in and semester out. Here we will present an overview of our testing program and discuss in some detail three important features: the selection of essay topics, special issues in scoring, and the development of a counseling pro- gram for students who fail. The examination at San Francisco State is called the junior English Profi- ciency Essay Test OEPET). It consists of a single assigned essay topic, on which every student writes an expository response in one hour. The test is required early in the junior year following a semester of freshman and one of sophomore composition, and students who fail it must take a junior exposi- tory writing course. The test is meant to be seen as an upper-division mini- mal proficiency test of a student's ability to write exposition. (Readers should remember that the term qminimal proficiencyq is relative and means what- ever local standards cause it to mean.) The essays are graded on a six-point holistic scale following, in general, the procedure developed by Educational Testing Service. Students who fail are invited to see a counselor, whose prin- cipal job is to see that no one fails who should have passed. Before beginning our discussion, we want to caution that in an absolute sense, the notion of testing writing proficiency is nonsense. for proficiency, as noted, is a relative term, and writing comes in as many guises as there are human interests and occupations. A poet may be inept in the world of busi- Sarah \X/arshauer Freedman is now Assistant Professor of Writing Research and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She works with teacher- researchers on processes of classroom inquiry. She has published essays in (among other jour- nals) CCC. Eng/irb journal. Renard) in II): Teaching of Eng/irb. and Educational Psychology. Wil- ll2I|1} Robinson is Professor English and Coordinator of Composition at San Francisco State Uni- versity. He has served on the English Equivalency Examination and English Placement Test committees in the California State University system, and has acted as a consultant on test de- velopment to other campuses in the system. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 4, December 1982 393