Students classified as juniors with at least 60 hours, but no more than 90 hours, are making final preparations as they prepare to take the Writing Proficiency Exam Sept. 27 – Oct. 1. The WPE, a university requirement, purportedly measures a student’s ability to write critically and creatively at a college level. MSU requires the test to make sure that MSU is graduating students that are clearly able to write papers that are college sufficient. Any student who fails the exam or does not take the exam is required to take English 2113.
According to Melissa Nivens, English lecturer, graduation requirements include the exam because it needs to make sure that graduating students are prepared to go out into the real world and write sufficiently enough to excel at the career path that they have chosen.
“We do not give the exam to incoming freshman, because we want to see how well they write once they have been in college for a couple of years. However, we keep the cutoff line at 90 hours so that any student who does not pass the exam has time to take English 2113 before they are due to graduate,” Nivens said. “In the future, there could be alternative ways of determining whether or not a students writing is sufficient enough to pass our standards however right now the two options of passing the exam or taking English 2113 is what we use to make that determination.”
Some students choose to attend MSU is because of the academic reputation that MSU has.
Jeff Ray, former MSU athletic director and men’s basketball head coach, and current men’s and women’s golf coach, said, “Midwestern State University is considered by many to be a very respectable degree. It has served me well in life. The WPE is just another test put in place to make sure that we are graduating quality students.”
The WPE is typically graded by two English instructors. The first instructor reviews the exam and determines whether or not it is a passing exam. That person hands it over who also scores it. If the two disagree, a third person grades the exam.
A big myth that is commonly believed amongst students, such as clinical lab science junior Alyssa Bell, is that a certain amount of students must be failed for officials to fill seats for English 2113 and thus make a profit on the class.
“Everyone has been saying it seems like they [MSU] pass half and fail half every time,” Bell said.
Nivens said she wanted to debunk this myth.
“The idea that we have to fail a certain number of students in order to fill English 2113 is completely untrue,” Nivens said. “It is a different number of students that take the exam every time, it is a different number that pass and fail. We do not have any kind of expectation going into it.”
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