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Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general.