City University trustees are determined to hold back diplomas for hundreds of community college students because they have failed a newly mandated English test. But this test does not test much at all.

The English proficiency requirement was imposed two weeks ago at Hostos Community College, a bilingual school in the Bronx, after heated debate about CUNY’s educational standards. The trustees are pledging to do the same at four other community colleges: Queensborough, Borough of Manhattan, La Guardia and Bronx. These schools and Hostos had spurned the university’s systemwide Writing Assessment Test as a condition of graduation, substituting their own measures of writing proficiency. They were right to do so.

The CUNY writing test, which requires students to produce a persuasive essay in 50 minutes, does pinpoint obviously incompetent writers. But its net snares many of the wrong fish — students with bright ideas who can create well-wrought phrases but who may have trouble with spelling or grammar. The victims tend to be students for whom English is a second language — those who make the kind of errors foreign dignitaries routinely get away with on “Nightline.”

Many of CUNY’s immigrant students can write forcefully argued essays. But though their English may be easily understandable, it is not native English. They might choose the wrong preposition or drop an article.

In theory, some grammatical, spelling and punctuation mistakes are tolerated on the writing test, as long as the student shows logical development of ideas and use of appropriate vocabulary. In practice, the test is hardly the objective standard that CUNY’s trustees imagine it to be. A few minor errors can mean the difference between passing and failing.

The exam readers are most easily put off by errors that reveal that the writer’s first language is not English. It’s acceptable, for instance, for a native speaker to write “ice tea,” but a student who has learned English as a second language is penalized for “more close.”

That mistake was made by one of my Brooklyn College students, Mikhail. His writing was some of the finest I’ve seen at CUNY, far superior to that in the memos clogging my mailbox. Mikhail passed the CUNY writing test on his third try, but one exam reader, apparently bothered by the small grammatical error, took the trouble to mark a minus sign next to his passing grade. Yet the most vacuous essays by native speakers can breeze through, because nothing is very wrong with them, even if nothing is very right.

No instructor who prepares immigrant students for the test is sure what will make the grade. Instructors offer different magic formulas for passing: Always begin your essay with an anecdote. Never begin with an anecdote. List three points. No, develop two points fully. State your entire argument in the introduction. Make the introduction catchy.

At Kingsborough Community College, where the CUNY test was already a requirement, students who fail it often do well in advanced academic courses that require them to pump out papers. Perhaps their professors are concentrating more on content than on language, but that doesn’t necessarily threaten excellence.

The university should not let unqualified students graduate. But CUNY’s test does not distinguish between them and their academically promising classmates whose writing shows slight signs that English is not their first language. So much should not hinge on such a flawed test.

Marcia Biederman has taught English as a Second Language at Brooklyn College and LaGuardia Community College.



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