Comparing US and UK College Admissions Writing (EARLI Antwerp 2006, with Mya Poe)

10th International Conference of the EARLI SIG Writing, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STUDENT WRITING FOR COLLEGE ADMISSION IN THE UK AND THE US
Mya Poe PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rob Oliver, Institute of Education, London

Sometimes writing involves high stakes...

This is a summary of our poster presentation in Antwerp.

Introduction

In both the UK and the US, student writing plays a significant role in the transition from school to college. “High stakes” writing, such as personal statements and standardized writing tests, are used to mediate the selection and placement of students in higher education.

In this project we documented and compared the literacy practices used in college admissions in the US and the UK outside traditional subject-based examinations. The genres of student writing were analysed and the national ‘genre sets’ mapped in order to understand the role played by writing in college admissions in each country.

Comparing Admissions Writing: US and UK

The study reveals how writing in college admissions is used simultaneously as a test of ability and a space for self-presentation. However, national contexts shape the scenes of writing in different ways:

In the US context, writing is used explicitly as a test of ability, whereas in the UK the explicit aim is self-presentation. However, in the US the writing prompts implicitly promote self-presentation by the student (of ideas, experiences or academic interests) and in the UK literacy skills are implicitly tested.

In both systems writing involves “high stakes” and is used as a tool for admissions. Readers are anonymous, students work without assistance and receive no feedback. Although presented as ‘neutral’ spaces for students to present their ideas, the genres used in both systems carry assumptions about academic ability, identity, and thinking skills which are considered to be ‘generic’, lying outside the discipines. The criteria for selection are often unclear to students, even though local criteria are clearly in operation and may sometimes be explicitly stated.

In the UK, the genres used in selection encourage disciplinary specialisation as part of the transition from school to college (‘Why are you applying to read this subject?’), whereas in the US this feature is less prominent. However, in the UK there are high-level initiatives to introduce new genres which test generic abilities. Our investigation suggests that these new initiatives result from interactions between the US and UK systems and involve issues of policy and funding.

(See this article by the UK Sutton Trust about trials of SAT-type 'aptitude tests' in the UK. Here the US College Board is cited as the owner of SATs and one of the backers of the project in the UK. Scroll down to article 'New study to gauge the impact of Aptitude Tests for university entrance').

Conclusions: Towards Cross-National Studies of Student Writing

Under this comparative analysis, writing for college admission can be seen as a set of multiple, variable practices, implicated both in national systems and the global education market, rather than as a set of autonomous 'skills' . The analysis illustrates how writing practices are shaped in and by national and international contexts, involving institutional traditions, government policies, and pressure from the private sector.

Our study suggests that more cross-national research on student writing is needed in response to this globalizing trend. Cross-national research:
• underscores how writing is shaped in national systems and traditions.
• demonstrates how national educational testing and selection systems influence each other, often through policy transfer and funding
• helps in the preparation of students who seek to enter college in different national systems

Given the global marketplace in which writing assessment is increasingly shaped, situated studies of writing in local or national contexts are insufficient. Methods are needed for rigorous cross-national comparisons of literacy testing and more research collaborations across borders.

United States College Admissions

The US has 4,387 post-secondary institutions, including two-year and four-year colleges. In the 2005-6 academic year about 17.5 million students attended universities or colleges in the US. Because the US has no centralized admissions board, admissions criteria vary considerably across insitutions. The most common university admissions criteria include:

* Application Form and Admissions Essay

* Standardized test score, eg SAT or ACT
* High school class rank and GPA

* Extracurricular activities and honors
* Letters of Recommendation

At present there is not a universal writing test for US college admissions. However, the two most common genres of writing for admissions are:

• Admissions Essay: untimed short essay written on a prompt chosen by the university. The essay is supposed to demonstrate the student’s creativity and thoughtfulness.
• SAT Writing Test: timed, impromptu essay + multiple choice questions. Essay: Students given 25 minutes to write on a topic they have not prepared. The essay measures students’ ability to organize ideas clearly, develop and support an idea, and use appropriate word choice and sentence structure .

United Kingdom College Admissions

The UK has 160 post-secondary institutions. In the 2005-6 academic year about 405,000 students were accepted on HE courses in the UK. All students apply though the same system, which is managed centrally by the Universities' and Colleges' Admissions Service (UCAS).

Students use the same application form which, in over 95% of cases, is submitted online. UCAS distributes applications to the students' chosen universities/colleges. Although UCAS manages the process, universities apply their own selection criteria using:

* Personal Statement

* (Predicted) Examination Grades

* School References

Student Writing in UK College Admissions

At present there are no nationally administered standardised tests of writing abilities in the admissions process and writing is not formally assessed outside subject examinations. However, writing is used in the selection process, mainly through the:

• Personal Statement: untimed short essay on student’s motivation for choice of subject, academic interests and background, and extra-curricular activities. Although statements are not formally graded, there is evidence that some institutions score them against local criteria and that writing abilities are implicitly evaluated. In the Personal Statement students are encouraged to focus mainly on their academic interests and aims in choice of subject.

Prompts for Student Writing: Untimed Assignments

In the U.S. a relatively decentralized approach to admissions means that colleges set their own writing prompts. These prompts tend to favour essayist writing based on significant experiences or issues. Many colleges make use of the ‘Common Application’ procedure (http://www.commonapp.org/) which includes a prompt for a ‘Personal Essay’:

This personal statement helps us become acquainted with you in ways different from courses, grades, test scores, and other objective data. It will demonstrate your ability to organize thoughts and express yourself. We are looking for an essay that will help us know you better as a person and as a student. Please write an essay (250–500 words) on a topic of your choice or on one of the options listed below.

1 Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
2 Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
3 Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
4 Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
5 A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an
experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
6 Topic of your choice.

In the U.K. the centrally managed system means that all students write the same genre, the personal statement, as part of their college application. The prompt encourages students to foreground their academic interests and reasons for choosing a particular course. The genre has more affinities with self-appraisal and CV-type genres than with scholastic essays. The current student guidelines from UCAS (http://www.ucas.com/) are as follows:

This is your chance to tell the universities and colleges you have chosen why you are applying, and why they should want you as a student. Admissions officers will want to know why you are interested in the courses that you have applied for and what you hope to do after your studies.
A good personal statement is important - it could help to persuade an admissions officer to offer you a place. In many cases, applicants are not interviewed, so this may be your only chance to make the case for your admission. It is up to you how you write your statement but we suggest you include some or all of the following points:

Why you have chosen the courses you have listed.
*What interests you about your chosen subject? Include details of your reading. *What career plans you have for when you complete your course. *Any job, work experience, placement or voluntary work you have done, particularly if it is relevant to your subject. *You may want to give the skills and experience you have gained from these activities. * Any involvement in widening participation schemes such as summer schools or mentoring activities. * Details of non-accredited skills and achievement which you have gained.

Personal Statements in University Entry (AcLits Seminar 2007)

Academic Literacies Seminar, UCL, 22 June 2007

Academic Writing and the School-to-University Transition: the Personal Statement as a Genre of Transition
(as part of a panel presentation on school > college transition with Christina Richardson, Tracey Costley and Martha Firestone)

Summary
This presentation looks at one written genre widely used in the British university admissions process – the UCAS Personal Statement (PS). Today I consider the PS as a genre of transition between school and university culture.

The PS serves as a tool of selection alongside examination grades and teacher references. It manages the transition of students from school to university. However, for students themselves it is often their first experience of writing for an academic audience outside the school environment.

This presentation gauges students’ understanding of this ‘new’ audience through an analysis of three writers’ revisions in subsequent drafts of their personal statements. The analysis suggests that through the personal statement students gain vital understandings about university culture, disciplines and academic writing whilst at the same time presenting themselves, as decisively as they can, as candidates in a competitive system.

In enacting these understandings in a formal text, they move beyond school-based, essayist conceptions of writing, but at the same time do not acquire genre knowledge which is equivalent to disciplinary writing in HE. The PS remains suspended between school and university. Precarious, but also caught up in pragmatic concerns, pressed by deadlines and the need to decide subjects, courses and locations.

The revisions shown in this presentation today suggest that the genre of the PS serves as a dynamic transitional space for students to imagine and project new identities beyond the world of school in response to their emerging understandings about university. I use the term ‘auditioning’ to describe the ways in which students ‘try out’ - and ‘try on’ - new wordings in their PS drafts. Functioning as a genre of transition, the PS plays host to subtle transformations through which the university is imagined or (to adopt Bartholomae’s celebrated phrase) ‘invented’.

My study suggests that ‘academic writing’ overspills university through a series of imaginings and recontextualisations. It is not a stable set of literacy practices bounded by a single institutional context and it does not begin when students enter university. Academic writing researchers might benefit from closer attention to the transition between school and university and the emergence of academic writing in the final years of secondary school, both in spaces defined by disciplines (history, science etc) and the more liminal spaces like the PS.

Widening participation initiatives rightly focus attention on school-to-university transition; but preparation of students for a pre-defined set of literacies in HE is not the only paradigm available for understanding student writing in transition. Student writing in this phase – often unstable, frequently revised, messy and contradictory – tells us also about competing identities amidst shifting notions of school, university, and ‘learning’.

For references and links see my bibliographies site at http://robsresearchbibs.blogspot.com/. For more on the UCAS personal statement see the site set up by Helen Martin and myself which is aimed at college-bound students: http://personalstatement.blogspot.com/