<p>Yes I think I did horribly on the writing placement test for Expos.
I will not talk about the actual assignment, but what happened was that when I saw the topic I blanked out for a while and then I was at a total loss for what to write. By the end of the two hours I produced a essay that was totally below my expectation. I know I could have written better if I weren’t so nervous. </p>
<p>I want to know how will the advisors grade the placement essays and determine your placement. I mean how bad will your essay have to be placed into Expo 10 instead of Expo 20?</p>
<p>I’ve heard that the bottom 20% are likely to be placed in Expos 10. And if you are…then you get more practice with writing at a college level! Not fun, no, but not the end of the world.</p>
<p>Yeah I know I screwed up, but I don’t think this one test should determine my placement because I know I can write better than this. What I am really anxious to know is whether the placement is mandatory. Do I HAVE to be placed into Expo 10 if the test result indicates so?</p>
<p>I had a similar concern. During the exam, I was suffering from some bowel malfunctions that necessitated my departure from my computer every 15 minutes, and for quite some time at that. As a result, I did not even complete my argument before time was up, and though I did manage to provide justification for the main points of my thesis, some of the smaller arguments I wanted to include were left out. Consequently, I turned in a half-baked piece of nonsense devoid of a conclusion and that only halfheartedly (when compared to the rest of the arguments present) responded to a portion of the prompt.</p>
<p>I think it’s going to be Expos 10 for me. It’s cool, though - more prep will bring better grades later, I hope. :)</p>
<p>I think I did pretty badly on every placement test I took.
I just about copied and pasted my essay into the writing one in time, but it was pretty short as I spent about an hour just trying to work out what I should write, 45 mins planning and just the final 15 mins trying to scrape it all into something readable.
Math was pretty bad. I did what it said and didn’t revise, but the last math I looked at was my SAT1, and the last math class I had was two years ago. Hope my future academic advisor considers that and doesn’t give me too hard a time.
French was pretty bad too. Also no revision and several years since I took a class. And I ran out of time in the middle of the listening, and guessed quite a lot of the listening answers because the recordings seemed to go on for ever and the little clock was counting don’t ominously.</p>
<p>Oh well. I guess I can just look upon it all as a reminder than I’ve got a LOT of room for improvement. Hopefully the test-scorers won’t already be thinking they made a mistake letting me in…Plus, for my ego, I have to remind myself that there wasn’t a history test or a politics test or anything…I’m sure I woulda done okay on that sort of a placement test if there was one…maybe…</p>
<p>I know a lot of people who were like “omg, I failed the writing exam” and then got into Expos 20, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If you do get placed into Expos 10, like Lirazel said, you get an extra semester of writing practice! And it’ll probably be a pretty easy course for you if you’re normally comfortable with writing, leaving you free to take more ambitious courses in your first semester if you want.</p>
<p>Side note: I was pretty sure I bombed the math placement exam, but I ended up getting placed in multivariable calc or something crazy (considering that I’m not a math person at all). This gave me the impression that the placement tests are pretty generously curved.</p>