The College Board’s National Commission on Writing: Writing: A Ticket to Work... or A Ticket Out, a survey of 120 major American corporations employing nearly 8 million people, concluded that people who cannot write and communicate clearly will not be hired and are not likely to be considered for promotion. The College Board’s National Commission on Writing: The Neglected “R”, states that more than 50 percent of first-year college students are unable to produce papers relatively free of language errors.
Recent studies have suggested that as many as half of today’s college freshmen must take at least one remedial course in college and more than four in ten of these students take a remedial writing course. Further research suggests that entering college students are marginally prepared or not ready for college-level coursework because they are struggling with fundamental English skills including:
- Using punctuation to clarify meaning
- Solving basic grammatical problems such as subject-verb agreement
- Determining the clearest and most logical way to link clauses
As a result, IHEs are finding themselves engaging in more writing remediation in an effort to prepare students for college-level coursework. Criterion(SM) Online Writing Evaluation from ETS offers students online writing practice to improve essay writing skills.
Criterion Online Writing Evaluation, by ETS, is a web-based service that provides instant holistic scores and annotated diagnostic feedback to help students improve their writing skills. Using Criterion, students work independently as they write and revise essays in order to improve their grammar, usage, mechanics, style and organization and development. Professors maintain control by selecting a predetermined prompt from the Criterion library or by creating their own prompt using the Instructor Topic Function. Faculty and students gain access to all writing samples from an online portfolio. Instructors have the ability to provide their own specific personalized feedback to complement the automated feedback. In addition, faculty can create performance reports for individual students or for an entire class.
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