Jaryn Taylor

Professor Myrtetus
English 1A
01 March 2015
Are Timed Essays Effective?
In schools today, particularly in high school and college they used timed writing test as a
study to see how well the student can write and demonstrate their knowledge in a timely manner.
Timed essay examinations are supposed to reflect student learning in higher education, says
Gavin T.L. Brown in the article The Validity of Examination Essays in Higher Education Issues
and Responses. The use of timed essays does generate the students to express their knowledge
at a much faster rate but the essays have way too many negative effects on a students practice of
writing and success. It does not determine how well a student can write because it an unfair
system and colleges should abolish the system.
Timed writing in schools have been a huge topic for discussion because there is a lot of
controversy behind it. Many people believe it to be problematic but it is still being used till this
day. Authors such as Wilson and Niemczyk dislike the method and want to get rid of it. They
believe that through this process, teachers and students often ignore the inner life of the
writer ,where all the creativity takes place. Another author, John Simmons thinks that its a good
system but it isnt being used correctly. He believes that it is good prep for the outside world but
the way they grade the grammar, usage, diction, mechanics, paragraphing, and legibility is too
harsh. One more author, Gavin Brown demonstrates how it can be a good method if it was
changed to improve the validity and usefulness. He offers a couple alternatives approaches for

the timed exams to help the writer be more effective and also states that the reliability of essay
scoring is highly problematic and he questions the validity of exam grades.
Timed essay examinations are not only a stressful and difficult but the way the essays are
graded are unfair to the writers. Students are put under a certain clock to write an essay that
correctly responds to a certain prompt and that contains all of things that make an essay complete
such as organization, good language and grammar, and structure. In order for students to make
sure there are any or few errors, they re-read and review their papers so that they can properly fix
them. This type of process does not happen over and hour or two, it can take up to many hours
and additional days. The process of test examination grading isnt quite fair. Test graders and
computer evaluations are focusing a lot on the language of the paper such as grammar errors as
well as organization. Brown expresses his feeling towards timed essay examinations in his article
and he states that an overemphasis on language aspects may weaken the validity of essay
examination grades. Regardless of how knowledgeable he or she is about the topic, students
take a big hit on their grade if their language and organization isnt to par. The focus on an essay
should be that the students knows what he or she is talking about and can explain thoroughly
their position on a topic. Many timed essay exams provide prompts that can be responded to in
different kinds of organizational patterns and writers sometimes go off into writing how they
want to. Since there isnt a lot of structure in the prompts, how can a writer know exactly how to
respond properly? That is the big problem with the system of grading these essays. It is unfair to
grade on an essay when there is no clarity on how it should be structured.
The article entitled Moving to the center: Disorientation and Intention by Wilson and
Neimczyk, discusses on how the practice of writing is starting to change. With many mandates
put on for exam evaluations, students are beginning to write not from the heart, but whatever

looks good on the surface to the examiners. The authors say that the educational mandates
create a single minded focus on the surfacewhat good writing looks like, not on how its
created. Students are writing there essay exams to best see fit the examiners. They have not
learned how to express themselves with real emotion but are learning to write down the basic
content that makes a paper look good. The article later discusses how students are becoming
vacuous writers, since it is the only way to get a good grade. The art of writing should be full of
feeling and thought and expression, and these mandated examinations are ruining a good writer.
College is all about writing and higher learning, you would think that they would want to get rid
of a system that is creating a bad writer. Teachers need to be teaching how to become great
writer, not how to be a good enough writer to pass the mandated tests they assess one.
In A Conflict Revisited by John S. Simmons, he discusses how timed essays are or can
be put to good use and can help students for the real world. He explains that putting students
under pressure presents a challenge for them to complete a task like you would at your job.
Simmons thinks that the way timed essays are used can be abusive. When it comes to
grammatical errors and sentence fragments, students should be graded so hard. He also views
that schools need to provide a mixture of timed writing and longer pre-writing methods so that
students can be prepared certain situations later on.
Time writing examinations are a way for teachers to evaluate a students knowledge but it
brings along many negative effects that far outweigh the benefits. The system that they use to
grade the exams have made it unfair for the test takers to get a reasonable grade. Students have
not learned how to write from the inner person but they have only learned to write from the
surface. Real emotion in writing is becoming lost. In order for the examinations to become more
beneficial, they need to use different alternatives so that the students may write to the best of

their ability. For now, colleges need to realize that their system is not helping the students
become good writers but it is recreating a new type of writer that is something far from a good
writer.