Assessing and Enhancing the Basic Writing Skills of Marketing Students

Employers consistently rank communication skills, in particular writing ability, among the most important skills for undergraduate business students to possess. However, improving writing skills, especially with respect to punctuation, grammar, and word choice, often requires substantial teacher time and effort. To assess and improve student writing skills in a time-efficient manner, the authors developed a computer-scored measure of students’ ability to edit for writing mechanics. The authors tested the method with a pretest and posttest design and found that when students were held accountable for improvement (with 5% of the course grade dependent on improvement), there was a significant increase in students’ ability to edit. Without that accountability, improvement did not occur.