Students receive four topics prior to starting the test and will be instructed to write an essay on one of two of those topics.  Before starting the test, students are asked to review sample essays, to give some thought to each of the four potential topics on the essay topic sheet, to make notes on the topic sheet, and to print the essay topic sheet. At the beginning of the English test, students will see two topics from which they may select one topic to write an essay. Only the first sentence of the topic selected will be displayed. Students will need to have the printed topics available to view the entire topic.

Each of the exam topics quotes a writer's position on an issue.  The exam directions ask the student to explain the writer's position, and then to express his/her own position on what the writer has said.  In other words, the student's job is to help readers understand both the writer's ideas and the student's own ideas on a particular issue.  The essay readers are not interested in whether the student has the "correct" position on an issue.  The readers do want to see how well the student read a passage, explains the writer's argument, and presents his/her own argument in an organized essay with relatively few grammatical errors.

  This PDF file contains a sample topic, a sample passing essay, and a sample failing essay.