Autumn 2005 Activity: Student Essays Available to High Schools, Colleges

ACT’s optional Writing Test is designed to provide college admissions officers with a measure of a student’s ability to produce a direct sample of writing. For high schools and colleges that participate in the ACT Essay View service, the Writing Test offers much more.

Essay View offers access to images of students’ handwritten essays. The free online service allows authorized staff members to see the essays written by each student who has released scores to that school. Along with the image of the essay, staff can see the prompt, comments from one of the readers who scored the essay, scores, and student information.

High schools and colleges may use the essays in a number of ways, said Nancy Rehling, ACT principal associate.

“Colleges, of course, may want to consider a student’s essay along with other materials in the application process. But they also can use it as part of an early intervention program, or to place students into appropriate writing courses, or even to guide individual tutorials,” Rehling said. “We expect high school teachers to use the essays to provide feedback to the students on their writing.”

Essays may be viewed online, printed immediately, or saved for future reference. The student’s ACT English score, ACT Writing subscore, Combined English/Writing score, and Composite score also are included in the information educators can see. Although the Writing Test score does not affect the Composite score, educators may find the Composite score useful.

Essays are available for one year after the student’s high school graduation. One person at each college and high school serves as the institution’s contact for ACT Essay View for that school. The official contact person is appointed by the school and may share the school’s login information with other authorized staff.

For more information on ACT Essay View, call 319/337-1245.