Department of English 
Placement Essay Criteria

The following outline for placement essay readers has been established, reviewed, 
and applied by the department each academic year. Readers are reminded that the 
criteria are applied to the student's writing whose baseline is to be an essay with 
college-level skills.

WRT 020 - English as a Second Language
Sample shows language difficulties resulting from second or third language 
acquisition. Sample tends to tack a clear sense of English word forms, word order, 
and word meaning.

WRT 030 - Basic Writing Skills 1
Placement sample may show little or no content; skills problems (including 
handwriting) often seriously interfere with communication. Look for such problems 
as random punctuation, rudimentary vocabulary, poor sentence sense (lacks 
coherence and/or logic), and serious problems at the word level such as inappropriate 
word endings and misspellings of commonly used words.

WRT 040 - Basic Writing Skills 2
Sample demonstrates some control of the composing process and communicates an 
experience or an idea, but is impeded by problems with paragraph development 
(lacks a unifying idea, has little or no support), sentence structure, diction (lacks 
clear control of nouns and verbs, uses oral language patterns rather than written 
language conventions, misuses commonly confused words, show inappropriate or 
incorrect word choice), punctuation, and/or spelling.

ENG 101 - Freshman English 1
Sample shows acceptable essay structure. Student can state the central idea of a 
paragraph and provides some supporting details for the central idea in his/her 
paragraph; student uses appropriate word choice, shows basic patterns of standard 
written English sentences, and has sentence sense (coherence and logic). The writer 
avoids or corrects fragments, improperly joined sentences and incorrectly spelled 
words.



Placement Essay Rubric
This rubric is designed to assist in grading placement essays. Since this is a holistic process,
a single error in any one category should not affect a student's placement. Each column below
lists the established department criteria for determining placement in Basic Writing Skills 
1, Basic Writing Skills 2, or Freshman English 1.

		WRT 030			WRT 040				ENG 101
		(sentence to		(paragraph to essay)		(rudimentary essay to
		paragraph)						more advanced
									college-level essay)

Main Idea	Doesn't address the	Suggests unifying		States central unifying
		assignment		idea/attempts to		idea as thesis;
					address assignment		addresses assignment

Support		Little or no content	Some control of the		Multi-paragraph structure
					composition process		adequate support; pertinent
					at the paragraph level;		support
					attempts to support
					(inconsistent); support not
					always relevant

Sentence Sense	Lacks variety		Some variety			Standard sentence patterns
		Faulty construction	Fragments, comma splices,	Avoids or corrects fragments,
		Lacks coherence,	run-ons				comma splices, run-ons
		logic			Problems with logic		Logical, coherent

Diction		Serious problem at	Oral language patterns		Appropriate diction
		word level		(subjective tone)		(subjective tone)

Vocabulary/	Rudimentary		Inappropriate/incorrect		Appropriate word choice
Word Choice	vocabulary		word choice

NOuns/Verbs	Inappropriate words	Shifts in tense			Demonstrates competency
		endings			Subject-verb disagreement

Spelling	Misspells basic		Commonly confused, misspelled	Applies spelling rules
		words (whent for	words (there, they're, their/
		went)			recieved for received)

Punctuation	Random punctuation	Problems with internal		Demonstrates punctuation
					punctuation			competency

Capitalization	Inconsistent		Common errors (High School/	Appropriate use of caps
		(Monday, but not	english)
		Friday)