The Academic English Writing Assessment (AEWA), also referred to as the “IELP Writing Assessment (G)” on your To Do List in Buckeye Link, is designed to evaluate your familiarity with academic writing at the graduate level in order to determine your initial placement in an academic writing course taught by the Intercultural English Language Programs (IELP) if needed to better ensure your success as a graduate student at The Ohio State University.
Test Format
The one-hour, online AEWA will begin with a short text, about one page in length, which you should read carefully. You will then need to complete two academic writing tasks: summarize the text and respond to the text.
PART 2: RESPONSE – Respond to the text. Your response to the text should provide your opinion(s) on the information presented and develop your ideas as thoroughly as possible as you cite specific details from the article and/or your own experiences and related background knowledge.
For both parts of the test, you should use and credit source information appropriately for an academic writing context; no specific citation/reference style or format is required.
Note that during your test, you must stay connected to ProctorU at all times, so it is essential that you have a stable internet connection and do not disconnect from your proctor until you are told to do so. If you disconnect from ProctorU before submitting the test or without notifying the proctor, your test will be invalid, and you may not be able to take the AEWA online again before you arrive on campus.
Also note that we recommend you plan at least 2 hours in total to complete the test because you need to complete a series of pre-check procedures with ProctorU before you can officially start to take the one-hour writing assessment, some test takers experience longer wait times to get responses from proctors during particularly busy testing periods, and/or technical issues may delay the start of your test.
After the test
Writing course placement
After successful completion of the test without incident, your submission will be rated by experienced IELP instructors to determine your initial IELP academic writing course placement:
- TLIELP 5901
- TLIELP 5902
- Qualifying (if no additional academic writing course is required).
Your test records on Buckeye Link
In most cases, the results of your test will be posted to your test records in Buckeye Link within two weeks of your test completion, thereby removing the hold on your account and allowing you to enroll in courses; we will also notify you by email when your AEWA score has been posted.
Once your score is determined and posted to Buckeye Link, the assessment cannot be retaken. Therefore, please make sure you are in a good testing environment and put forth the effort to ensure that your writing demonstrates your ability.
Evaluation criteria
Your AEWA submission, consisting of your written answers to both the Part 1: Summary and Part 2: Response, will be evaluated on the following criteria:
1. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to understand and accurately summarize main ideas from the article.
- Does your summary demonstrate your comprehension of article with the inclusion of the essential main points and the exclusion of non-essential information? Are the main ideas from the article accurately and concisely presented in your summary with no misrepresentations or inaccuracies?
- Is your summary more than just a list of sentences? Is it sequenced in a way that is logical and effective in capturing the gist of the reading? Would someone who has not read the article be able to have a clear understanding of what its main ideas are and how they are connected just by reading your summary?
2. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to develop your response to ideas.
- Is your response sufficiently long, original, and directly connected to the information in the article?
- Is your response well developed with evidence of critical thinking and in-depth supporting details from the article and/or your own experiences and related background knowledge?
3. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to logically connect ideas within your writing.
- Does your writing demonstrate a clear and coherent connection across all ideas and sentences in a way that flows naturally and requires no mental effort from the reader to fill in the gaps?
- Are ideas connected by incorporating a variety of cohesive devices (i.e., transition words or lexical chains, among others) with no redundancy or awkward repetition
4. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to clearly communicate ideas in your writing.
- Is your writing easy to understand and follow?
- Are your ideas presented precisely with sufficient explanation of your reasoning as to leave no room for confusion or multiple interpretations?
- Is the language you use appropriately specific and not overly vague, overgeneralized, or cliché?
5. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to use academic (formal) style, including appropriate vocabulary and grammatical accuracy and complexity.
- Is the language you use appropriately formal for a graduate level academic paper? Are you able to capably discuss research practices, results, and implications in writing?
- Does your writing demonstrate strong control of a wide range of grammatical constructions (including appropriate subordination and multi-clause structures) and general vocabulary? Is your use of formal, academic vocabulary appropriate?
- Are any noticeable errors present minimal and isolated as to not interfere with understanding or distract the reader?
6. Your writing will be evaluated on your ability to demonstrate your familiarity of academic rules for using the words and ideas of others.
- Do you maintain a clear separation between your own words and ideas and those from the source article and any secondary sources included within it?
- Are you able to effectively paraphrase ideas from the source by restating them in your own words while giving credit to the original author(s)?
- Are any direct quotations used within your writing effective, marked correctly, and contextualized appropriately?
- Do you cite the information from the source appropriately in a way that demonstrates your familiarity with academic documentation?
Note that no specific citation style or format is required, so you should use the style/format you are most familiar with. Be sure to include all necessary identifying information so that someone reading your summary could find the original source of the information.
