Assessment in Writing Across the Curriculum

The development of WAC programs raised two kinds of assessment questions—concerning assessing students’ work and assessing the success of programs. First, student writing needed to be assessed in a new context. WAC in its very principles challenged the traditional assessment based on general skills displayed in undifferentiated testing situations. WAC highlighted that there were many different forms of writing that varied from discipline to discipline, and what counted as good writing for a literature class would not pass muster in a physics lab, and vice-versa. Moreover, WAC points out how closely forms of writing are tied to the knowledge and activities mobilized in any writing task. Finally, WAC points to the active construction of learning and knowledge by the student in the course of writing, so that it is not appropriate to measure writing simply against a fixed standard. Second, assessments of WAC programs were even more problematic than the known difficulties of assessing writing programs. The heterogeneity of WAC programs, the range of faculty involved, and the multiple desired outcomes of student performance made the display and measure of a program’s accomplishments and shortcomings a complex and uncertain matter.