Every undergraduate at SF State must take the Junior English Proficiency Essay Test, or JEPET in order to graduate. The JEPET is an hour-and-a-half written expository exam that requires students to advocate a position on a general interest topic. JEPET gives students one chance to “test-out” of an upper division writing course. Upon failure they are require to take English 414.

The JEPET has become an easy target for some people, as it seems another bureaucratic obstacle for students to overcome – the test costs $40 and is only given on Saturdays. Some students believe that the JEPET is a scam, a money making scheme for the university, as is the upper division writing requirement.

According to James Warren Boyd, lecturer for SF State’s English department, in the Spring of 2008, the JEPET will be gradually phased out, and all students will be required to take a version of English 414 that will teach writing specific to their major. This transition away from the JEPET represents years of academic debate and a complex restructuring of state writing requirements.

The JEPET seems to have become a galvanizing event between faculty and students. Faculty accuse students of whining and laziness, while the students, again, wonder where their $40 goes. As with most conflict, both sides have legitimate arguments.

History

The JEPET, in part, is the result of a study done at Dartmouth, which found that student’s writing skills were at their highest after they took lower division writing courses, but deteriorated and even plummeted as they graduated, according to JEPET literature from the composition office.

Former English Department Lecturer Mark Schnieder explains some JEPET history:

“About 35 years ago, English 414 was a required junior-level writing course that all SFSU students had to take. Then, sometime in the 1970’s, the JEPET was created as a means for students to test out of English 414 if they could display writing competence. This was an effort designed to save the university money since funding a junior level university-wide required course is expensive: It takes a lot of teachers and classroom space to offer these courses, especially because there are so many junior transfers coming from community colleges. However, after several years of using the JEPET to allow students to test out of English 414, the university decided to make the test a requirement in an effort to save even more money by weeding out more students who didn’t necessarily need to take the course. (Believe it or not, when JEPET was an option, many students actually opted to take the course instead of the test because they thought they could use the extra writing help.) Unfortunately, as time went on and a new generation of college students entered the university and were required to take the JEPET, the test and English 414 gained the stigma of being unnecessarily burdensome.”

Phasing out the JEPET

An explanation of California State University (CSU) writing requirements means diving into a sea of acronyms and a swamp of bureaucracy. The Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement, or GWAR. “All undergraduate students must demonstrate upper-division written English proficiency as prescribed in CSU policy,” according to University Policy on Written English Proficiency, from the Academic Senate.

“The JEPET (or 414/410/411) will remain an alternative for fulfilling the GWAR for students who begin their college studies before Fall 2008 and who maintain continuous enrollment,” says the University Policy document.
Undergraduates who are first time college students in Fall 2008 or later will satisfy the GWAR requirement by earning a C- or better in a GWAR- designated course in the major department or college.”

In other words, students starting school on 2008 no longer have to take the dreaded JEPET.

My Story

The JEPET was absurdly chaotic when I took it. Long, overlapping lines snaked from the Business and HSS buildings, down to the library, and back again. Students were irate, cursing, pacing, throwing up their arms and generally enraged (but unable to do anything but wait and trickle slowly to their designated area).

Further adding to the chaos was the lack (or complete absence) of staff to herd students into their specific lines, broken down by last names and payment status.

And then there was the test itself. Being a journalism major, I was feeling fairly cocky about the whole thing, adamantly refusing to study. The essay was your standard thesis statement, supporting argument, conclusion type of structure.

The most challenging part of writing the JEPET, was writing by hand I hadn’t hand-written an essay since high school, and my hand ached and cramped. I had no spell-check, and writing in pen, no way to correct mistakes.

With regards to JEPET, I knew it would be easy to attack the testing office, and I knew, before I had even asked questions, that the testing office was probably under-funded and over-burdened. I spoke briefly with the head of testing (who did not want to give an official interview because of a long history of misquotes with [X]press).

Unofficially, the gentleman confirmed my suspicions: the staff and size of the testing office was the same (over a period of 20 plus years), while the demand for services increased dramatically. The head of the testing office also said that my particular JEPET was an anomaly, and most tests were not so chaotic.

Darn, no bad-guy there – and as I asked around, there really wasn’t a bad-guy anywhere. But my JEPET had sucked, and I really wanted to write about that. I was also looking forward to doing an opinion piece, which meant a blessed departure from the rigidity of newspaper style. I got to write in the first person, and I got to say things like: “the line moved like a drunken snail crawling through syrup on a cold winter day.” The overall point of my piece was that there has to be a better way.

My piece drew an immediate reaction from Mark Schnieder, who is also a member of the Committee for Written English Proficiency (CWEP), which discusses writing requirements at SF state, and is partially responsible for doing away with JEPET.

Schnieder wrote: “these authors [of which I was the most recent] are unfortunately perpetuating unnecessary myths, misconceptions, misinformation, and overall bad attitudes about the test to their peers.”

This is a remarkably serious accusation, and as a student journalist, I find it on par with the current administration accusing the media of perpetuating negativity about the war.

But darn, Schnieder kind of had a point. Some things are easy to complain about, long lines being one of them.

Schnieder, in his response to my opinion piece, also kind of agreed that the JEPET sucks. He wrote:

“In my time on the (CWEP) committee, much of our discussion has been about eliminating both JEPET and English 414 and creating required upper division writing courses in the disciplines so that Business students would take a Business writing course and Chemistry students would take a Chemistry writing course and so on. This is a brilliant idea; this is the way the writing requirement should be . . . But these improvements take a lot of time because policy change in academia moves at a snail’s pace. In the meantime, we are stuck with the JEPET, which is the best we can do for now despite all of its obvious pitfalls—it is the best of a bad system at a university that constantly struggles with budgetary and personnel problems.

In Conclusion

It seems that everyone has gotten their way. The faculty has a better system to test students writing proficiency at the end of there college careers, and students no longer have to take a $40 test on a Saturday.