Guidelines

• You should plan on spending five to eight hours planning, writing, and revising the two essays.
• You may take the Online Evaluation only once.
• You may write the essays on a computer, and use spelling and grammar checkers.  You may also use dictionaries and writing handbooks.  In addition, there will be links from the essay questions to The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, a comprehensive online writing handbook used at MIT. 
•  The essay questions are designed to allow you to write appropriate responses without any additional research.  We encourage you to spend your time planning, writing, and revising rather than researching the topic further. You will not need to consult outside printed and online sources, but, if you do, you must acknowledge in your essay each time you use an outside source of information. In addition, you must either paraphrase the information in your own language or enclose the language of the outside source in quotation marks. You may use any standard reference style for acknowledging sources. Complete guidelines for using and citing sources, including procedures for citing electronic sources, will be available through links to The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.
• Students who take the Online Evaluation cannot then take the pencil-and-paper make-up FEE during Orientation. 
• Students who do not complete the Online Evaluation over the summer will be required to take the pencil-and-paper make-up FEE or the EDR on Monday of Orientation week, unless they have received a score of 5 on the AP Language and Composition or AP Literature and Composition test. 
• Once you access the readings for the essay you should not discuss the subject matter with anyone.  Furthermore, you may not receive any assistance from anyone in planning, writing, revising, or editing either essay.  When you submit each essay you will be required to write out the following statement: 
 

I hereby affirm that I did not discuss the reading or question for this essay with anyone.  Furthermore, I affirm that no person helped me in planning, writing, revising, or editing this essay. I also affirm that, if I consulted any outside materials after looking at the reading or essay topic, I have cited the source of each external item of information or opinion.