Writing Wrongs

The governments attention to the poor has went from benine concern to malignant neglect.

This example of writing wrongs by a Michigan State University student appears in the current issue of the school's alumni magazine. Last fall about 11% of M.S.U.'s 7,700 freshmen were required to take a remedial course in English. Says English Instructor Mary Davis: "Even though they can talk to you as sophisticated and aware 18-year-olds, their voice on paper is that of a ten-year-old."

The same problem exists at scores of other colleges. Cornell, Stanford and Wisconsin have established special writing-improvement centers that students attend voluntarily. At Yale, for the first time since the late 1950s, "bonehead English" (basic composition) is being taught freshmen lacking the most rudimentary skills.

No wonder, then, that colleges are looking forward to some help in evaluating the writing skills of freshmen before they arrive on campus. The College Entrance Examination Board (C.E.E.B.) has decided to add to its college-admissions testing program next fall a short-answer test of standard English. In experimental use for three years, this exam will now become a separate but permanent adjunct of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that is taken by roughly 1.4 million students each year. Further, the board will reinstitute a 20-minute essay section in the present English Composition Achievement Test, one of 15 exercises taken annually by some 300,000 college applicants seeking course placement. The essay option, which was dropped in 1971 because of the relatively high costs of grading it, will return in December next year. Colleges can only hope that both C.E.E.B. actions will, to quote from another M.S.U. student's paper, "ease there pain."

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