Proficiency test essays are short-form, persuasive style essays. (See Know your non-fiction style for more on these and other styles of essay.) The proficiency test essay asks that you exhibit a core skill used in all forms of professional and personal communication. This skill is the ability to express an opinion clearly and concisely. Proficiency test essays have minimum and maximum word-length for their essays, usually only a paragraph or two. These tests ask you to give an opinion about a single topic backed by two or three talking points. And they require that you follow the traditional essay structure.
The proficiency test essay style
Proficiency tests use the persuasive essay style. They ask for your unresearched opinion, which means there’s no ‘wrong’ answer. You’re being tested on your written language skills, not how much you know.
The focus on opinion rather than knowledge is why some tests offer a choice between several topics. It’s also why those tests offer multiple talking points for each topic. They’re giving you both options and details to increase the chances that you’ll have a strong opinion about one. This makes the essay, difficult as it is, more accessible.
There are less accessible tests. They only have one topic, usually something of current social importance. These tests expect you to ‘be aware of current events’ and to ‘be informed on the issues’. That means that they are expecting you to watch the news and be active on social media.
In either case, the essay itself is relatively simple. That doesn’t make it easy. If it were easy, there would be no point in putting it in the test.
Major Challenges in the proficiency test essay
Here are the challenges many students have told me they faced when going into the higher levels of the proficiency tests for the first time.
- You’ve never written an essay before. You might never have strung more than 2 sentences together that weren’t a basic greeting or question.
- You know a lot of grammar, but you’re unsure how to turn that knowledge into groups of sentences to form a paragraph.
- You’ve been concentrating on your school curriculum and haven’t been paying attention to current events. You don’t know enough about the topics in the test to form an opinion on any of them.
- You’ve done well at school, memorising everything the teachers put in front of you. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prepared you to express an opinion of your own.
- You’re a Jr High or High School student and you do well at English. You can express an opinion on topics that interest you like music, movies, and manga. Unfortunately, when you open the test, the essay topics use words that just aren’t in your vocabulary. The writers designed the test for people in their 20s or older. You’ve never given topics like this a thought before.
Admittedly, most of those students were Japanese. In my experience, most forms of second-language writing aren’t common subjects here. The Japanese curriculum spends plenty of time on grammar. It spends very little time on turning that technical knowledge into practical writing experience. I’m sure the same is not true of every school, or even of every country.
Facing the proficiency test essay
Even if you found your situation on the list, there’s still hope. The examiners want you to show that you can express your opinion clearly and consistently. They want to know if you can support your opinion using a standardised structure and meet a target word count.
The standardised essay structure
- Your essay must include an introduction, body, and conclusion.
- It must focus on a single topic.
- It must answer the question posed.
- It must include several talking points with logical connections to the central topic.
Facing your shortfall
Even if you know nothing about the topic, you can still provide an answer that fulfils the marking criteria. You do that by:
- addressing the topic
- stating your opinion clearly
- following the essay structure, and
- providing an answer to the question.
How the proficiency test essay score is calculated
Remember, in proficiency tests, they aren’t judging you on the answer. Their primary concern isn’t even on how grammatically correct your writing is (that comes further down the marking sheet). The first and main thing the proficiency test essay markers look for is if you can use English to express and support an opinion in writing.
Of course, it’s not that easy. If your grammar and spelling make the essay unreadable, it won’t matter how clearly your opinion is stated. If the marker can’t understand what you wrote, you’ll fail. The sentences have to be understandable. But this correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling are towards the bottom of the list, not the top.
This means you need at least some basic understanding of grammar and your spelling has to be close enough that the words are identifiable.
I’m assuming here that you can at least put a sentence together and have it make sense to the reader. What the proficiency test demands is a step beyond that. Your sentences must be on topic and relate to each other. They have to be linked, one idea flowing into the next. Everything else is secondary to that because it’s tested elsewhere.
Writing the proficiency test essay
Example 1
My dog is a Labrador. I get home at 5:30. My sister plays video games but doesn’t do her homework. I am hungry. My school lunches are delicious. My friend plays baseball after school.
Critique
That’s not an essay. It’s a collection of random sentences only loosely connected because they’re each about the writer’s life. Even if the topic is ‘Your Life’, this paragraph still wouldn’t work because the connecting theme isn’t strong enough.
Example 2
I go to Hiragishi High School. The school lunches there are delicious. My friend and I are on the baseball team and have practice after school. I usually get home at 5:30 and take my dog for a walk before dinner. My dog is a Labrador. I have a younger sister. She usually plays video games instead of doing her homework.
Critique
This is a much better ‘essay’ on My Life. It contains all the information from the first attempt, but makes a lot more sense because of the order in which it’s presented. It would likely get a good mark in a Grade 3 test. For one thing, it’s twice the length they expect, for another the grammar and spelling are spot on. 😉
The fact that it’s long means you could cut several bits out of that and make it even more coherent. You don’t need the bit about school lunches, or to mention the friend being at baseball practice with you. You also don’t need to mention the breed of your dog.
Example 3
I go to Hiragishi High School. I’m on the baseball team and have practice every day after school. I get home at 5:30 and take my dog for a walk. I do my homework after dinner.
Critique
There’s a little less information in this one, but the word count is down to under 40 and the focus is much tighter. It’s all about you, not your friend, your dog, or your sister. And that’s the topic, right? “Your Life” So this is a perfect Eiken Grade 3 writing exercise.
The proficiency test essay at higher levels
But what about those higher grades? The ones where they ask you about topics ‘relevant to some social, professional, and educational situations.’ Situations that you know nothing about?
Remember the four points mentioned above. Then also remember that there’s always more than one answer to a question, especially a question asking for your opinion. So, the “Your Life” essay above could also be answered in several more ways.
Example 4
I was born in Yamanashi Prefecture. I moved to Hokkaido when I was in Junior High School. At first I was very lonely. I missed all my friends. I joined the baseball club and made a lot of new friends there.
Example 5
I want to be a professional baseball player and play in the major leagues. I practice hard every day and watch all the games. I also study English so that I will be able to talk to my teammates in America.
Workarounds for the proficiency test essay
When writing the proficiency test essay, you must answer the topic question and address the talking points. That doesn’t mean you have to take tackle the topic head-on. If you don’t know enough about the topic, go with that. This is an English proficiency test, not a social knowledge test. The only thing they care about is if you expressed yourself clearly and stuck to the topic.
Here’s an example Grade 2 question and a workaround response.
Example 6
Today, many people are using food delivery services for most of their meals. Do you think it’s good?
・Cost
・Health
・Time
I have never heard of food delivery services other than Todoku. It delivers groceries and specialty items to your door. I think this is very convenient for many people, especially the elderly. It means that those who are too busy to get to the shops can still have fresh food. Also, for the elderly, they don’t have to carry heavy bags from the shops to their houses. This is very dangerous in winter when the roads are slippery. I think these grocery delivery services are sometimes cheaper than what is in the store because they do special sales for members. I think that food delivery services are very good.
Critique
The question didn’t intend for you to talk about grocery delivery services. It wanted you to talk about the rise of companies like Uber Eats, Wolt, and Demae-can. Perhaps mention how expensive such meals are when compared to their cost in-store. It wanted you to discuss the health risks for people who eat too much fast food. And it wanted you to mention how such delivery programs don’t really save you time. Or, conversely, how wonderful it is that people can get healthy meals delivered to their door at a reasonable price and in less time than it would take them to make something similar.
But none of that matters, because you still answered the question. You still addressed all their talking points. And you did it in essay format and to the suggested length. Well done.
Last words on the proficiency test essay
There’s another aspect to these essays that is perhaps of equal difficulty for many students. This is their inexperience with essay writing. Your school might have focused on grammar and dealt with writing on the sentence level. If you were lucky, you might have done some creative writing. Chances are, though, that you didn’t write essays, at least, not in your second-language studies class.
I’ve given you the basics of how to structure an essay, and how to approach the question. So now you know what to do. For students with little writing experience, stringing a dozen sentences together to create a coherent essay is a daunting task. There’s really only one trick that can make this easier. The only way to get comfortable expressing an opinion and writing to length is practice.
If you want some essay prompts, check out this series: Writing practice.
