It’s early, but you’ve managed to grab a bagel on the way out the door. You had a desent night’s rest, and your mind is relaxed. You pull into a parking space, grab your two ID cards, and shuffle your way to a half empty classroom. “I’m ready,” you think to yourself. Finally as the instructor goes through the list of essentials, the essay topic is laid out on your desk.

“Analyze the feudal law system…tell us what you know about dowry and bride burning ‘good or bad?’…and what are the negative or positive aspects of donkey carts?”

Bizarre? This is the same feeling that most foreign students are fastened with the first time they lay eyes on a topic. Most foreign graduate and undergraduate students that attend Sacramento State have only lived in the United States less than three years.

The majority who take the Writing Proficiency Exam as a foreign graduate student will undergo this process within their first six to nine months. Writing on topics such as gun control, euthanasia (assistant suicide), abortion, youth violence in video gaming, and even television talk shows, it becomes largely difficult constructing an analysis with little or no background knowledge of the topics.

“Though they have provided free extra classes to help us on the exam, some of the topics are very difficult because we can’t form an opinion based on a single article,” concludes Mazher Qayyuum of Pakistan, a grad student in the engineering department, “it doesn’t serve me any purpose as an engineer; I learned nothing from it. It doesn’t prove how I’m going to be a better engineer.”

When asking Moizuddin Ahmed, a Pakistani grad student, the most disturbing aspect of the exam, he says “the topics relate to U.S. culture, and I haven’t spent too much time here to be comfortable with the topics…also American writing standards are different from the British writing standards taught to us in Pakistan.”

Also regarding to how the topics are constructed, a Sac State Professor of Anthropology argues, “The topics should be more of an even playing field. What are the assumptions guiding these topics? However…all standardized tests of the social sciences have a cultural bias to some degree. Some can be proven through even the smallest amount of research…but it should obvious with this exam, especially when you start writing about television talk shows.”

Another aspect of the exam is that most foreign students fail the test twice. “I took the exam with about 10 other guys (foreign students), and only three of us passed, each with minimum scores of eight,” replies Syed Waqar, a second year foreign graduate student. But as most students who fail the WPE twice, they are required to take an English course that will enable them to fulfill the graduation requirement. The problem is, for a foreign grad student, the penalties and costs are much higher. “Not only does it postpone our graduate study projects, it costs $282 per unit. That means we pay $846 for an extra three unit course,” states Mazher.

Finally, the largest fault in requiring the WPE for a foreign student is the fact that all have passed the Testing of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which “measures the ability of nonnative speakers of English to use and understand North American English as it is used in college and university settings. Scores on the test are required by more than 4,300 two- and four-year colleges and Universities.” According to the TOEFL website. The validity, reliability, and construction of the test has been repeatedly proven.

“The test was a big deal. It cost $110 just to take it!” remarks Mazher. “The average income for someone back home is about $50 a month…so I don’t see why we have to take the WPE if we’ve already passed the TOEFL.”

These are the harsh realities that a foreign student must persevere through in attaining an American education. There ought to be a solution in aiding this process so WPE will not hold cultural biases. One way to resolve this is to gather more than one topic at a setting so the writer can choose which one they decide to write upon. Or not come up with topics that are just so blatantly culturally specific. One wouldn’t know about dowry unless they specifically took a course in anthropology or history, but in India it’s an institutionalized practice.

Finally, these are only temporary solutions to fixing essay topics and how one would write upon them. But if all foreign students have to pass a preliminary exam for an English equivalent (TOEFL), the WPE ought to be done away with.