CUNY Terminology

Comprehensive College: CUNY’s term for a college that offers both a terminal associate’s program and a terminal baccalaureate program. John Jay, Medgar Evers, New York City College of Technology and the College of Staten Island are CUNY’s comprehensive colleges

CPE (CUNY Proficiency Exam): The CPE is an internal test that all CUNY students must take by the time they accumulate 60 credits. The test was mandated by a Board of Trustees resolution in 1997 to ensure academic literacy, to demonstrate that CUNY students posses the communication and analytical skills employers seek, and to show that students are ready to move ahead into their junior and senior years. There are two parts to this test: Analytical Reading and Writing, and Analyzing and Integrating Material from Graphs and Text.

CTL (Center for Teaching and Learning): Over the past few years, these centers have been instituted or are being instituted at nearly every CUNY College. They are meant to serve as hubs for academic support services (like tutoring), faculty development, and pedagogical innovation.

CUE (Coordinated Undergraduate Education): CUE is a University-wide initiative (established 2002) that draws together the college’s best efforts and most effective programs in order to provide students with a coherent and meaningful college experience from admissions through to graduation. A cooperative effort at reorganizing and interweaving the college components, CUE is represented by a coordinator at each campus and is overseen by University Dean for Undergraduate Education Judith Summerfield at the Central Office of Academic Affairs. CUE forges bonds between the colleges’ WAC programs, Freshman Programs, Transfer Programs, Summer Programs, and Academic Support Programs, while also initiating inquiry into the academic coherence of core curricula through the new General Education Project.

CUNY/ACT Basic Skills Tests: The three CUNY/ACT Basic Skills Tests are: the COMPASS Reading Test, the CUNY/ACT Writing Sample, and the COMPASS Mathematics test. These three tests are used to demonstrate college-readiness. Unless they can demonstrate an appropriate SAT, ACT or N.Y. State Regents score, students must receive a passing score on these tests to be admitted. These are also the official gateway tests that allow remedial and ESL students to move into credit-bearing classes. Exceptions from testing: students who have been classified as “ESL” and students who qualify for SEEK are exempt for one year from entry. Students with a bachelor’s degree or higher are also exempt. Resources for students who do not initially pass the tests or who are exempt include USIP, Prelude to Success (below), SEEK and CD.

NOTE: ACT is a non-profit organization that develops education tools, including the ACT test that many college-bound students take. Originally, "ACT" stood for American College Testing. In 1996, however, the official name of the organization was shortened to "ACT." The CUNY ACT and COMPASS tests are developed by the ACT organization for CUNY.

ESL (English as a Second Language): At CUNY, a student is officially designated “ESL” if they have attended a foreign high school for at least one term and can demonstrate minimum proficiency in mathematics. Students may also be designated “ESL” on the basis of writing samples. An ESL designation means that the student may enter a baccalaureate (or associate) program without first demonstrating qualifying scores on the skills tests. The student then enters a sequence of ESL courses, most of which carry no or few credits.

General Education: The liberal arts component of the degree that is required for all students; the bedrock of education. As students flock to professional majors and the state of higher education shifts around a largely commuter, community-college population, the definition of General Education is also in flux. The CUNY General Education Project seeks to examine, for the first time in decades, the general education requirements at each college to ensure that they provide a meaningful base.

Master Plan: Every four years, the University [who, exactly) puts together a comprehensive plan emphasizing areas of future growth and setting goals for the entire University. The current Master Plan can be found online at http://www.cuny.edu (follow the “Administration” link on the left).

Remedial Education: In 1999, the Board of Trustees phased out remediation in baccalaureate programs. Students who have not received qualifying scores on the skills tests may enter remedial education (such as CLIP, SEEK, or USIP programs) at CUNY’s community colleges.

SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) and CD (College Discovery): Opportunity programs initiated in the 1960s to assist high potential, low income students who otherwise might not be able to pursue a college degree because they are not academically well-prepared for college level work. SEEK and CD offer an array of counseling and academic support to New Yorkers seeking admissions to a comprehensive or senior college, or a community college, respectively.

TAP (Tuition Assistance Program): Based on financial need and funded through the Legislature of the State of New York, TAP covers the full or partial tuition payment for the most needy students. Students may receive four years of benefits for baccalaureate degrees and three years of eligibility for associate degree study. This year, CUNY students are receiving more than $130 million in TAP benefits.

UE (Undergraduate Education): the department of Academic Affairs that oversees WAC, as well as CUE, the General Education Project, and other University-wide academic programs.

USIP (University Skills Immersion Program): Designed to help students gain enrollment into CUNY, USIP Programs are short, intensive college-preparatory classes offered to would-be students who have not passed the basic skills tests required for admissions. Several (but not all) colleges have USIP programs; they run during the summer or January intersession and usually culminate in a chance to retake the skills test(s).

Key WAC/WID Concepts

WAC, WID, WIP, WTL:

Some academics and administrators use the following terms and acronyms interchangeably: Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), and Writing to Learn (WTL). For others, the terms are pedagogically, historically, and politically loaded.

Broadly speaking, the central premise behind WAC is that students need to write, informally and formally, in all of their courses (not just in English and composition classes), for their writing and thinking to improve. WAC is often considered a pedagogical movement, bent on changing the modes of learning and teaching, particularly the reliance on multiple choice and short answer modes of assessment. WAC, scholars argue, will not only make students stronger writers, but will also provide more opportunities for students to integrate learning and make connections across the disciplines. Proponents of WAC claim that there are writing experiences and exercises that cut across the disciplines.

Proponents of WID, on the other hand, have argued that the WAC programs that developed in the States should be more focused on writing within disciplinary frameworks rather than writing as a decontextualized personal process. These programs, WID proponents have argued, focused too much on expressivist functions of language. Writing in the disciplines, therefore, privileges disciplinary contexts and representational forms and styles, recognizing the particular modes and conventions within specific academic discourses. As a counterpoint to WID, Writing in the Professions (WIP) focuses on writing within specific professions, rather than disciplinary bodies of knowledge.

Common WAC/WID Terminology

Audience: Those for whom a piece of writing is intended. The identity of the audience shapes the writing, as writers adapt their tone and content to the situation. It is especially important to keep in mind the difference in audiences implied by discipline (the audience for a lab report, for example, is different than that for a performance review)

Essay: In the classical sense, the first-person singular commenting upon, questioning, debating, arguing about—a subject. Although “essay” is often used interchangeably with “paper,” the term properly refers to a type of writing that blended the personal with the learned. As a verb, “essay” means an initial, and sometimes tentative, attempt.

Expressive, Transactional, Poetic Uses of Language: Britton and his team developed a framework for classifying school writing, based on sociolinguistic theories of the functions of language (drawn primarily from the work of linguist Roman Jacobson). They were concerned that most school writing was written to the teacher and that students were not encouraged to try out the whole linguistic keyboard. The three categories of language function, according to Britton in Development of Writing Abilities are:

1. expressive—“a use of language which relies upon a reader’s interest in the writer as well as what he has to say.”
2. transactional—“language to ‘get things done’ or participate in the world’s affairs: i.e., in our model, to inform, persuade, or instruct.”
3. poetic—“writing as a verbal construct, a patterned verbalization [poem, story, song, etc.] of the writer’s feelings and ideas.”

Freewriting : An informal writing activity that allows students to write “freely” without concern for grammar, punctuation, and other constraints. Free writing is often considered a staple in composition pedagogy: typically, students are directed to write in class without stopping for a set period of time (usually just a few minutes). An instructor may specify a topic or leave the writing entirely up to the students. What is done with the writing varies widely: the texts may be read out in class to prompt discussion, or used as a source of ideas for another writing assignment, or not used directly by the instructor at all. In the Portfolio section there is an example of a directed freewriting assignment.

Grammar: The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences; the system of rules inherent in any language (from the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed). Grammar needs to be distinguished from usage, which is the way the language is conventionally used within the culture. Grammar is structure, form, syntax, and by the time children are four or five, they’ve “got” the structure of the language they hear all around them. The debate about how to teach what students need to know to gain fluency in Standard Written English (see below) is a cultural, political, and historical debate of paramount importance that rages throughout the English-speaking world. CUNY students need to gain fluency in academic discourse – and, therefore, standard usage.

High-Stakes Writing: Writing assignments that are expected to be completed according to the conventions of formal academic and disciplinary conventions and that usually count for a significant part of a student’s grade. High-stakes writing includes many of the traditional academic writing assignments. This term is generally paired with the term “low-stakes writing” to draw attention to all the other kinds of writing that students do (or might do) and to the ways that instructors could assign and respond to other kinds of writing. In Britton’s framework, the function of high-stakes writing would be “transactional,” that is, to get the business of college done.

Examples of high-stakes writing assignments:

• Essay exams
• Research papers
• Lab reports
• Critical response papers

Journal: Generally informal, journals can be a productive place for students to record their thoughts, experiences, questions, and informal writings throughout college, in all disciplines, as well as in their daily lives. A variation on the journal in a double-entry journal. Students write in two columns: the first column contains quotations of their choosing from a reading; the second column contains their reactions or responses to those quotations. Many variations are possible. Students might be asked, for example, to use paraphrases or summaries in the first column instead of quotations. Triple-entry journals, in which the third column might be used for peer responses, research questions, etc., are also commonly used.

Language: To talk about writing is to talk about the uses and functions of language, as well as to talk about politics, history, and culture. All converge at CUNY, which is an extraordinary crossroads of languages: our students speak (and, perhaps, write) over 120 different first languages.

Low-Stakes Writing: Low-stakes writing activities provide students with an opportunity to experiment with ideas, form, and style without the pressure associated with correctness. Low-stakes writing represents the level of expectation that a student and instructor bring to a particular assignment. That is, in terms of a student’s grade in a course, low-stakes writing should count for very little (if at all), while high-stakes writing is presumably graded. Some argue that the more students engage in low-stakes writing, the more confidence and expertise they will apply to formal, higher stakes assignments. In Britton’s framework, low-stakes writing would be “expressive;” that is, it would give the reader an opportunity to be interested not only in the writing but also in the way the writer is learning the subject.

Examples of low-stakes writing assignments:

• Brainstorming
• Journals
• Reflective responses and summaries
• Freewriting

Minimal Marking: Many faculty are concerned that they spend a great deal of time marking and correcting grammatical and other technical errors. Minimal marking reduces the amount of time spent correcting, and therefore allows for a greater number of writing assignments. The principle behind minimal marking is that correcting each technical mistake is not the most useful way to respond to students’ work; minimal marking encourages a focus on the larger ideas the student is trying to communicate and responding to those. Faculty may choose to point out one or two recurring technical errors, but should focus their responses to the work as a whole.

Paper: Common college short-hand for a formal, graded assignment of a specific length. “Paper” covers a lot of ground, from “essay” to “report,” and is also often modified by adjectives like “research,” or “compare/contrast.” Some argue that WAC/WID provides a space for educators to reflect on the many assumptions that cohere around vague terms such as “paper” or “write” or “composition.”

Peer Review: Practice of having students read and provide comments and suggestions for each other’s writing. This is generally done in class in pairs or small groups. Instructors can use peer review to have students work on a variety of writing tasks. Also referred to as Peer Editing, Peer review is often guided through the use of handouts or worksheets—see the Writing Fellow Portfolio section for one example of a peer review worksheet.

Rhetoric: The art of speaking or writing effectively, using the principles and rules of composition drawn from classical traditions, typically tied to the art of persuasion. Rhetorical conventions were articulated within classical forms, which came to be known in composition studies as modes of discourse.

Scaffolding: Scaffolding is a term drawn, primarily, from the work of Russian cognitive psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, to represent the centrality of social interaction between teachers (mothers) and learners (children) in the development of cognition. The term has come to be used within education to refer to the ways in which complex projects can be broken down into manageable projects, with the instructor/expert guiding the students/novices through the entire process, encouraging students to move to higher levels of expertise. Faculty can monitor how students are developing their ideas throughout, and provide assistance if the student encounters obstacles. (Scaffolding needs to be distinguished from tutoring, which implies teaching to a specified task, and modeling, which typically involves imitation.)

SWE (Standard Written English): English, especially as spoken in New York City, is heavily influenced by other languages and dialects. STW refers to that form of written English that is agreed upon by most publishers, colleges, and standardized tests to be the most “correct” and thus most understandable by all speakers and users of English regardless of differences in dialect or usage. There is much debate over the extent to which SWE is a hegemonic curtailment of students’ freedom of expression.