Placement into undergraduate ESL/EAP courses
Undergraduate students can be placed into ESL Program courses by themselves or upon the recommendation or requirement of their advisors in their home departments. There is no official institutional testing mechanism for placing students into undergraduate or graduate ESL classes.
Further guidance in placing students is offered through the following rubric, which clarifies the expectations for students entering either ESL015 or ENGL015. Both courses fulfill the university’s first-year writing requirement.
| ESL 015 | ENGL 015 |
(1) What type of writing did you do in your previous school (i.e., high school or other school)? | Usually write essays of more than two pages and also wrote essays that involved some library research | Frequently wrote essays of four or more pages and research papers |
(2) What did your teacher focus instruction on? | Writing to develop & ideas, writing to argue & support a position, practicing grammar, vocabulary, & essay structure | Writing to develop and communicate ideas, and writing to argue and support a position |
(3) How easily can you read and paraphrase someone else’s words to support your ideas without committing plagiarism? | Usually easily but not always | Fairly easily |
(4) How frequently do you revise your papers? | Typically but not extensively | Often |
(5) How often do you read other writer’s texts to help you develop your ideas when writing essays in English, without committing plagiarism? | Sometimes | Often |
(6) Do you consider yourself to be a confident and competent writer in English? | Somewhat | Very much so |
(7) How often do you make mistakes in grammar and vocabulary while writing in English? | Sometimes | Rarely |
Placement into graduate ESL/EAP courses
Graduate students can be placed into ESL Program courses by themselves or through the recommendation or requirement of their advisors in their home departments. There is no official institutional testing mechanism for placing students into graduate-level ESL classes.
Some departments place international graduate students into ESL/EAP courses for general language support, and some permit international students to take ESL116G instead of the departmental English writing test.
The Graduate School may require graduate students who have been provisionally admitted due to low TOEFL scores to enroll in either ESL114G or ESL116G, or both.