The Study of the Quality of Descriptive Text Written by the Third Year Students of English Departement of Maha Putra Muhammad Yamin Universitas Solok

The quality of the writing a text is needed at the university level. Thus, the students should have good writing skills. Meanwhile, the students still have some difficulties in writing a text. There are many factors that cause the students failed in writing a good quality of text. They are; unclear identification and description, unable to organize details, and applying the correct grammar patterns, selecting appropriate words, writing spelling and punctuation of text. That’s why, the research is aimed at explaining the students’ quality of writing a descriptive text. This was a descriptive research. The population was the third year students of English department of Maha Putra Muhammad Yamin University Solok. The sample of the research was derived from random sampling and the data were collected by using test. For the test, the researcher provided five topics. The students chose three of them to be developed in descriptive text. The data from writing test were analyzed by using scoring rubrics for the four components of the text such as identification, description, organization and language features. Based on the analysis of the three texts written by the students, it was found that the third year students of English department of Maha Putra Muhammad Yamin Univeristy Solok was mostly poor in writing descriptive text. There were 11 students got good quality in identification, 17 students were poor, 2 students obtained very poor and none of the students got very good quality. Furthermore, after analyzing the texts per indicator. It was found that 2 students got very good, most of them (20) got good, 6 was poor and 2 was very poor for identification. For description, there is 3 of the students were very good, 13 of them got good, 13 students also obtained poor, and very poor was only 2. Most of the students (18) were poor, 8 of them was good, 2 of them got very good and there was 2 of the students got very poor in organization component. The last component was language features. None of the students achieved very good category in this component, most of the students (15) were poor and 11 of them was good category and there was 4 of them got very poor. The findings above shows that the students are still have problems in writing descriptive text. Therefore, based on the result of the research, the students are suggested to pay attention to the identification, description, organization and language features of the text. The writing lecturers at the university are also suggested to guide the students how to write a good descriptive text by paying more attention to the four components of the descriptive text mentioned above.