Week Fourteen: Writing Timed Essay Exams

During your college career, it is likely that you'll be asked to produce three different kinds of writing: essays, research papers, and in-class exams. (If you are in the sciences, you'll also be required to produce lab reports.) In the course you're completing, you've focused on writing essays and, if you've gotten the hang of this, you've also begun to ask the kind of questions that require additional research and more room to discuss your ideas. While the connection between writing essays and writing research papers may seem pretty straightforward, it may not be so obvious how practicing this kind of writing helps prepare you for writing under completely different conditions-by hand, in a room filled with other students, and for a clearly specified amount of time.

To be honest, the timed essay is a mode of writing that is peculiar to the academy: nowhere else will you be "asked" to sit down and write out your response on the spot to a question that someone has just put to you. Whatever one may think about the lasting value of such writing, it is simply a fact that success in school depends upon developing the ability to produce writing that is well organized and well thought out it under timed conditions. And it is for this reason that we conclude our course with a timed final exam.

We believe that your work in this course has provided you with the skills required to write well under these conditions: we believe that, by the end of this course, you should be able to generate essays that work with the assigned materials to establish your position on a given issue and that you should be able to do so in prose that is well-organized and relatively free of errors. We also believe that, by this point in the semester, you should be able to predict with some accuracy what kind of question will serve as your writing prompt. With these skills at your disposal, you should be able to write enough in the time required to establish that you can present an intelligent, reflective response to the kinds of questions that are used to prompt in-class essays.

Thinking about what your teacher wants you to do

"What is my teacher looking for?" This is the question that is foremost on students' minds during exam period. The problem with this question is that it can lead one to think that what is required to prepare for essay exams is the power to read minds! We think a better question is this one: "What is it that my teacher wants to see me be able to do with the assigned materials?" Asking the question in this way focuses attention on the skills you've acquired and perfected over the semester. These skills include:

1. Developing a position that responds to the assignment question

2. Identifying key ideas from the essays to support that position

3. Organizing your thoughts so that they are in conversation with two or more texts

4. Choosing appropriate evidence to clarify your position

5. Establishing how your evidence led you to your position

6. Creating relationship between ideas across paragraphs through the use of transitions

7. Proofreading to bring grammatical and syntactical errors under control

You've spent the past fourteen weeks developing these skills: the in-class exam provides a forum where you can demonstrate that you can call on these skills when you are working under timed conditions.

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