Self-Assessment Essay Instructions

Instructions for the Self-Assessment Essay
English 12 Final Portfolio


In order for your portfolio to be complete and ready for final assessment by outside readers, you must compose and include a self-assessment essay. This essay is the most important document in your portfolio, so it deserves your time and attention. In this essay, your task is to demonstrate that you have met, or haven’t met, the assessment criteria for English 12 as described in the portfolio assessment criteria document. The self-assessment essay should:

• Consider the assessment criteria categories one by one, describing how well you have met these criteria in the writing you have included in the portfolio.

• Make explicit and detailed reference to particular pieces of writing and places within those pieces that provide evidence demonstrating your accomplishments and/or your struggles in a particular area.

• Be brutally honest and straightforward in its description of your progress, accomplishments, and struggles.

• Highlight progress and change through the semester. Make it easy for your reader to see how your essay writing has developed over the course of English 12. No one expects you to be a “perfect” essay writer by the end of the course; instead, we value evidence of your growth as a writer.

• Explain the document you have chosen to include in your “writer’s choice” category (if you have chosen to include something). In order for this document to be valuable to your readers, they need to understand what you are trying to accomplish through the writing and why you have chosen to include it in your portfolio.

• Be an essay—meaning that it should be a focused, cohesive piece of writing in which you argue for your own accomplishments as a writer in English 12.

The self-assessment essay should avoid:

• Flattery of yourself and of your instructor.

• Unsupported and exaggerated claims of growth and change as writers and learners. Any claim you make regarding your growth as a writer must be explicitly supported by evidence drawn from the documents you have chosen to include in the portfolio.


Finally, it is vitally important that you take this self-assessment essay seriously and spend quite a bit of time working on it. It will serve as your readers’ “map” for your portfolio. It may strongly determine what your readers notice and value as they read over your coursework. Please take the time to do meaningful work on this essay before submitting a final version of it in your portfolio.