Okay, normally you will never find me getting behind a testing agency or consequently any of its products. I’m about to make an exception, so hold tight to your seats.
ETS has an online essay evaluation service, which I don’t have enough knowledge of to make an informed opinion about, but this service is supported by a website full of essay topics that are just pretty darned good.
Now here’s the caveat: I don’t like any of the college-level essay prompts. I don’t like them because they are all persuasive topics that either encourage un-researched pontifications the likes of which no right-thinking college class would accept in essay form, or they are such personally-driven complex topics that they could result in solid essays only if the writer was outstandingly good at keeping her emotional responses out of the essay.
Here’s an example:
Breaking Traditions (Persuasive)
Many adults become upset when young people break with traditions of the past. Do you think that these adults are justified in reacting this way? Why or why not? Support your position with evidence from your own experience or the experiences of people you know.
This kind of topic makes students work hard at remembering something particular from their pasts, something that they don’t have time to do in timed essay-writing sessions. Then it makes them embed those memories into an outline that makes a point: something that they’re not likely to do if they remember an experience that was painful for them or one of their friends. They are likely to take the low road in their writing when they write about something they perceive as unjust that has happened to them.
So: the essay topics in the college-level category are topics that should be given ahead of time, developed ahead of time, then written, and ideally not under timed conditions.
But the early ed topics! Ah, how wonderful! Not so much for timed writing assignments, but oh how fun it is for college students to return to the kinds of topics they were asked to write in early grades!
Here’s an example:
Best Friends (Compare-Contrast)
People can be different in some ways yet still be best friends. Describe you and your best friend. Then explain two ways that you are similar and two ways that you are different. Give examples to show how you are alike and different.
Okay, the crappy “two ways” and “two ways” prescription needs to be cut for college, but the one semester I used this site to help students generate ideas for essays, they were thrilled with it. Two of their five topics that semester could come from this site, and they had fun writing while attending to form, content, organization, flashback techniques, and thick description.
You can dance to it: I give it a “nine.”
http://www.ets.org/Media/Products/Criterion/topics/topics.htm
One of the dream classes that I’ve always wanted to teach is a class for student-athletes about identity writing: writing yourself as an athlete. In the past, I’d planned to look at all of the genres that athletes might go on to write: box scores, autobiographies, text interview replies, letters, etc. And of course over the years, I’ve added blog posts, Twitters, and Facebook profiles to that list.