Entrance testing is not the answer

By Roger Graves and David Slomp. University students need to learn to write for different disciplines and assignments, and testing the skills they learned in high school isn’t relevant to what they will need to learn. 
We commend Nicholas Dion and Vicky Maldonado for calling for assessments of university students’ writing (“We need to assess student literacy skills”) in University Affairs. We agree with their argument that without these assessments, universities will face budget cuts and students have no way of proving their worth as writers. However, we disagree that entrance testing at the university level will contribute to solving this problem. In a series of conferences we’ve organized in Alberta over the last two years, we have talked with more than 100 high school teachers, university instructors and administrators about the transition from high school writing to university writing. More...