Exemption Exams

ENG 101 EXEMPTION EXAM

The ENG 101 exemption exam is designed to assess students’ proficiency in English to a level deemed appropriate to follow English medium undergraduate instruction without the support of the English Academic Skills I (ENG 101) course content.

The ENG 101 exemption exam consists of four sections, with a total of 100 points. These sections are Listening, Reading, Vocabulary, and Writing.

The Listening section is worth twenty (20) points and consists of two tasks. In Task 1, students listen to a lecture on an academic topic, approximately four minutes in length and played twice. They take notes in the box provided on the exam sheet. In Task 2, students use their notes and write an academically acceptable summary of the lecture in the box provided on the exam sheet. The summary is graded based on the criteria given below (see Table 1 for the grading criteria).

The Reading section  is worth twenty (20) points and consists of a single task. Students read the abstracts of three academic research texts, each approximately 200 words, and answer ten multiple-choice questions.

The Vocabulary section is worth twenty (20) points and consists of two tasks. In each task, students read an academic paragraph containing five blanks and select the appropriate option for each blank. In Task 1, students choose the word that best fits the meaning from a range of words, while in Task 2, they choose the correct form of the same word.

The Writing section is worth forty (40) points and consists of a single task. Students are required to write an academic text of approximately 200–250 words in response to a short prompt related to the topic covered in the exam. In their response, they are expected to support their own ideas using information from the Listening and/or Reading sections, incorporating at least one paraphrase and one direct quotation with appropriate in-text citations. The written response is graded based on the criteria given below (see Table 2 for the grading criteria).

Table 1. Listening section, grading criteria

Table 2. Writing section, grading criteria

ENG 102 EXEMPTION EXAM

The ENG 102 exemption exam is designed to assess students’ proficiency in English to a level deemed appropriate to follow English medium undergraduate instruction without the support of the freshman English programme.

The ENG 102 exemption exam features listening, reading, vocabulary and speaking (presentation) sections.

The listening section is worth twenty (20) points and and consists of one task. Students listen to an approximately ten-minute academic lecture or interview twice and answer ten multiple-choice questions.

The reading section is worth thirty (30) points and consists of two tasks. In Task 1, students read an academic text and answer fifteen multiple-choice questions. In Task 2, students read five different short academic texts and answer five multiple-choice questions.

The Vocabulary section is worth twenty (20) points and consists of two tasks. In each task, students read an academic paragraph containing five blanks and select the appropriate option for each blank. In Task 1, students choose the word that best fits the meaning from a range of words, while in Task 2, they choose the correct form of the same word.

The speaking section is worth thirty (30) points. Students are expected to deliver a three- to four-minute oral presentation on one of the topics they choose among the three options given before. Students are NOT ALLOWED TO USE POWERPOINT in their presentations. They can only have cue cards with keywords on them to help them remember the content of their speech. Complete sentences are NOT allowed on cue cards. Students should carefully prepare their presentation according to the grading criteria (see Table 3) and be ready to deliver it on the exam day. The presentation topics are announced on the School of Foreign Languages website before the exam day.

Table 3. Speaking section, grading criteria