Issue date: 2/18/09 Section: News

Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, answers questions about the Electronic Writing Portfolio requirements at a forum in the Physical Science building on Tuesday night. The Student Government-led event allowed for students to hear about the history of the EWP and how it has changed into the program now in place. (Audrey Sawyer / The Daily Eastern News)

The Electronic Writing Portfolio forum Tuesday night clarified some questions and concerns students had about the requirement.

Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, and Bonnie Irwin, dean of the Honors College, answered questions.

Lord said the EWP was started in 2000 to replace the Writing Competency Exam, a three-hour test that would be held at 8 a.m. on a Saturday.

Irwin said the test was divided into three parts: grammar and usage, expository essay and a persuasive essay. Students didn't know the essay topics beforehand and had to pay for the exam.

Many students would come into the test intoxicated and not do well, Irwin said.

"It was not accurately measuring how our students were writing because they were really better writers than they performed on the exam," she said. "It's not the time, it's the type of writing. In a real writing situation, you are given a blind question and asked to respond in a matter of minutes. That was one of the problems that professionals have said."

The administration then got together and created a more accurate gauge of students' writing abilities.

"The Writing Competency Exam contained vanilla writing, the kind where students didn't invest time to learn about the topic and commit," Lord said. "EWP takes samples from coursework that students are in and presumably committed to succeed in."

The EWP was revised last summer to actually have samples submitted online instead of walking to Ninth Street Hall, Lord said. There would also be three submissions at 750 words or longer — excluding lesson plans, poetry, short stories, plays and foreign language written pieces, which can't be submitted.

Students who score below a two on written submissions are encouraged and notified to go to the Writing Center and or the Student Success Center. Failure to do so would result in a hold on the student's records.

The highest score that can be received is a four.

"We will encourage them with whatever means we have through the advising process, e-mails, and doing better in school with improved writing," Lord said. "We haven't talked about the nature of the sanctions yet because it's been only one semester."

During summer 2006, Eastern reviewed the mandatory requirement of submitting an EWP piece from a senior seminar. Lord said 10 to 15 percent of portfolios were reviewed while most of the portfolios would contain seminar samples.

"What they learned is that we weren't getting good samples of writing so it wasn't getting us a feel for our students abilities because senior seminar submissions were less sophisticated than previous coursework," Lord said.

Irwin pointed out the general reasons for the seniors' poor performance would be due to their spending more time in their major classes.

The data for the new EWP is only from the fall semester, Lord said. But he did say there could be an improvement.

"Students who have submitted two writing samples in the fall showed improvement on the second score," Lord said. "Whether it was a coincidence because it was a small number or whether students were really improving has to be seen throughout more semesters before we could answer it."


Bob Bajek can be reached at 581-7942 or at rtbajek@eiu.edu.

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