Location: The Study Plan > Writing Practice Exercises

Writing Practice Exercises

Writing Practice exercises provide a way for your students to get immediate, automated feedback on an essay without instructor involvement. A student selects an exercise, writes an essay (up to 1200 words), and submits it for feedback. The automated process evaluates whether the text fulfilled the exercise directions and provides feedback that includes:

An overall score from 0 to 6
Individual feedback and scores for the six writing traits: organization, ideas, conventions, sentence fluency, word choice, and voice
Possible spelling errors
Possible grammatical errors

The MyLab saves the feedback as part of the exercise's draft history and records the score in the Gradebook. You can change or override the automated score with your own score.

When you enable the Writing Practice exercises, you specify the number of drafts (up to five) per exercise that students can submit, and you can allow them to also submit their essays to you for review and a score. As with other write exercises, you can return the essay to the student for a rewrite before you enter the final score.

As you create a course, you can enable the Writing Practice exercises in the Course Builder. Once the course is created, you can turn this feature on and off by editing the Writing Practice properties in the Study Plan.

Note: The number of drafts that students can submit can be set either in the Course Builder or for an individual exercise. If you did not edit the number of allowable submissions in the Course Builder, the default number of submissions is course specific. (You cannot reset the global number of drafts allowed after the course is created.)