Portfolio Placement for 102

Portfolio placement dates for summer/fall semesters are February 1 – August 1. Placement dates for spring semesters are October 1-December 1. Any portfolio submitted outside these date ranges will not be reviewed until the subsequent review period.

It is important for students to begin college in writing courses that best fit their levels of experience and current ability. If you are confident that you are ready for our second-semester course, English 102, then you can submit a portfolio to be considered for placement into that course. This portfolio consists of a cover letter and a few samples of your writing.

Your placement portfolio will be processed in approximately two-to-three weeks, although this may vary depending on the time of year.

Important notes:

• Students may only participate in the portfolio placement process one time. Additional submissions will not be considered.
• If any work in a portfolio is plagiarized, we will not consider it for placement and your fee will not be refunded. In addition, your work and evidence of plagiarism will be kept on file and a copy will be sent to the Office of Student Conduct.

Submission instructions

1. Pay the $40 fee via MyNevada. Review instructions to make this payment.
2. Review the Portfolio Guide for tips and examples.
3. Choose the writing that you will include in your portfolio. Please include three-to-four essays, preferably written for classes in the last two years, that represent your writing experiences and abilities.
4. Plan, draft and revise a cover letter. Your letter should include:
   1. Your full name, NSHE ID number and an email address we can use to reach you
   2. A statement explaining why you should be placed differently than your test scores suggest
   3. The bulk of your letter should make specific references to how your writing samples demonstrate how you have met or exceeded the student learning outcomes of English 101, available on the core writing course descriptions page.
   4. The cover letter is the most important part of your portfolio, so take care to plan your ideas, seek feedback, and revise. Please look at these excerpts with evaluator feedback from portfolio cover letters submitted to our credit-by-exam program. While these letters are a bit different from those seeking placement into 102 (for instance, they reference the 102 outcomes instead of the 101 outcomes), they provide some good detail about what portfolio evaluators are looking for in these cover letters.
5. Combine your cover letter and writing samples into one PDF file with the filename formatted as Last Name_Placement_Portfolio.pdf. Microsoft has instructions for saving a Word document as a PDF file. Please make sure that each essay and each page is clearly labeled so that readers will know where each essay begins and ends.
6. Submit your portfolio via the Portfolio Submission Survey.
7. Your portfolio will be read by the Core Writing Program’s portfolio readers and you will receive the results via email of your portfolio placement. If you have any questions about the status of your submission, email Isis Lopez Aguilar, the first-year writing placement coordinator.

Note: due to FERPA regulations, we can only communicate portfolio results to the student in question. Any other person, unless that person is a parent and the student is a minor, must provide a signed privacy waiver (available from Admissions and Records) before the Core Writing Program can communicate the student's placement results or any other academic information.