An Ontario university that requires students to pass an exam on English language skills says almost a third of students are failing.

And other universities are finding a small percentage students must take remedial grammar courses to qualify for graduation.

Ontario's University of Waterloo is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students it accepts pass an exam testing their English-language skills.

"Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at the school. "We would certainly like it to be a lot lower."

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, "still can't pass our simple test," she says.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett.

"If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."

At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, 10 per cent of new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.

That 10 per cent must take "foundational" writing courses first. Simon Fraser is reviewing its entrance requirements for English language.

"There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency," says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university's director of academic advising.

Professors and administrators at Simon Fraser say they're seeing more emoticons and texting terms like 'cuz' show up in work that is handed in.

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations" show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.

"Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she said, adding these are new in the past five years.

Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written "because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.

"The words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' — 'definately'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

He is floored by some of what he sees.

"I get their essays and I go, 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra.

Then he's reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.

At least one expert says part of the blame should go to cellphone texting and social networking on internet sites.

There is an internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons, said Joel Postman, author of SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.

That type of informal writing may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work, said Postman.

"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

There is some good news.

"Spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck [computer program]," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.