Write Placer assesses the writing skills of new college students. Test scores help colleges determine whether a student is ready for college-level coursework or would benefit from developmental instruction before taking credit-bearing courses. Students taking Write Placer are presented with a prompt and asked to write an essay of 300 to 600 words. A prompt consists of a short passage. Following the passage is an assignment that requires the student to focus on the issue addressed in the passage. Write Placer prompts are carefully designed to allow the student to respond quickly and in a variety of ways. They are free of technical or specific literary references and don’t require specialized knowledge. The prompts are designed to stimulate critical thinking and are relevant to any number of fields and interests. Students will be asked to draw on a broad range of experiences, learning, and ideas to support their point of view on the issue in question. Scores on Write Placer range from 1 to 8. An essay that is too short to be evaluated, written on a topic other than the one presented, or written in a language other than English will be given a score of zero.

Write Placer gives you an opportunity to show how effectively you can develop and express your ideas in writing. You will first read a short passage and an assignment question that are focused on an important issue. You will then write an essay in which you develop your point of view on the issue. You should support your position with appropriate reasoning and examples. The position you take will not influence your score. Your essay will be given a holistic score that represents how clearly and effectively you expressed your position. The following six characteristics of writing will be considered:

• Purpose and Focus — The extent to which you present information in a unified and coherent manner, clearly addressing the issue
• Organization and Structure — The extent to which you order and connect ideas
• Development and Support — The extent to which you develop and support ideas
• Mechanical Conventions — The extent to which you express ideas using Standard Written English
• Sentence Variety and Style — The extent to which you craft sentences and paragraphs demonstrating control of vocabulary, voice, and structure
• Critical Thinking — The extent to which you communicate a point of view and demonstrate reasoned relationships among ideas

The Next-Generation Reading test is a broad-spectrum computer adaptive assessment of test-takers’ developed ability to derive meaning from a range of prose texts and to determine the meaning of words and phrases in short and extended contexts. Passages on the test cover a range of content areas (including literature and literary nonfiction, careers/history/social studies, humanities, and science), writing modes (informative/explanatory, argument, and narrative), and complexities (relatively easy to very challenging). Both single and paired passages are included. The test pool includes both authentic texts (previously published passages excerpted or minimally adapted from their published form) and commissioned texts (written specifically for the test). Questions are multiple choice in format and appear as both discrete (stand-alone) questions  parts of sets of questions built around a common passage or passages.

Four broad knowledge and skill categories are assessed:

• Information and Ideas (reading closely, determining central ideas and themes, summarizing, understanding relationships)
• Rhetoric (analyzing word choice rhetorically, analyzing text structure, analyzing point of view, analyzing purpose, analyzing arguments)
• Synthesis (analyzing multiple texts)
• Vocabulary

You do not need to take an English placement test and are eligible to register for English 101 if you meet one of the following criteria:

• You have a high school GPA of 2.7 or higher.
• You have an ACT score of 18 or higher.
• You have an SAT score of 480 or higher.
• You received your GED after 2016 and scored a 175 on the Reasoning Through Language Arts.

If you scored between 5-8 on the ACCUPLACER test, you can register for English 101.

You are eligible to register for English 100/101, or you may take the ACCUPLACER Write Placer Plus to place into English 101, if you meet one of the following criteria:

• You have a high school GPA of 1.90-2.699.
• You have an ACT score between 13-17.
• You have an SAT score of 460-476.
• You received your GED after 2016 and scored between 145-175.

If you scored a 3 or 4 on the ACCUPLACER test, you will need to register for English 100/101, or you may retest with permission from your student success coach.

You may register for English 100/101 plus reading, or you may take the ACCUPLACER Write Placer Plus to place into English 101, if you meet one of the following criteria:

• You have a high school GPA of 1.89 or below.
• You have an ACT score of 12 or below.
• You have an SAT score of 200-459.
• You received your GED after 2016 and scored 144 or below.

If you scored a 1 or 2 on the ACCUPLACER test, you will need to register for English 100/101 plus reading, or you may retest with permission from your student success coach.