I'm going to be honest about Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-First Century--A Primer," I hated every second of reading it. I will admit that it gave a comprehensive look at writing assessment, its waves, and its controversy, but it was just a boring read for me. The way the document had been scanned into the computer also made it difficult to read; on every other page the text was very faint, and I had to get really close to the screen to even make out what it said, which put a lot of strain on my eyes.
I feel that, because of my age, I have been privileged to experience assessment of my writing skills from all three waves. When I was younger I think holistic writing assessment was cresting while multiple choice testing was still in the posterior part of its wave. I can remember selecting multiple choice grammar and vocabulary questions on tests like the CAT, GEPA, and HSPA. Even the SAT had some questions like that, although my SAT was one of the first to feature the essay writing section, which was a holistic assessment. When I was in highschool I had my first experience with portfolio assessment as well. I believe it was in a creative writing class that they asked me to do a portfolio and reflections. Aside from that, however, the dominant writing assessment in my highschool years was holistic. It was not until junior year in college that portfolio assessments became the norm.
The whole issue of having to assess writing in a certain way just to please and validate the teaching of writing to people outside of the discipline is kind of ridiculous to me. It seems like the humanities have to devote a disproportionate amount of energy into justifying themselves as something worth learning/teaching. I don't know if this is because of the notion that STEM is the key to America's economic future, or what. I mean, what if we asked teachers of physics to justify themselves in the terms and norms of writing assessment? How would they do it? And how would they feel about it? Sometimes I feel like WAC is the only thing keeping English departments alive in American universities/colleges.
Shortly after I began working in the writing center, I realized that
writing centers have a very hard time with assessment. Because we don't
have access to grades, we had to come up with a way to gauge the
progress of students who regularly attended our sessions. We decided to
look for similar things to the composition rubric, with extra allowances
made for things like lifelong learning skills. In that way, I guess we are floating somewhere in the holistic wave.
I've told the story in class about the representatives from a college in Florida I encountered at a writing center conference. Their school graded entirely with "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory," which removed a lot of the obsession with grades that distracts students from just LEARNING. If I had to offer a solution to the challenge of writing assessment, it would be to adopt that same kind of grading system. Did the students demonstrate all or most of the skills listed on the outcomes sheet? Yeah? Okay. They get a satisfactory. They learned. End of story. Less stress; less fuss, for everyone involved.
