The evaluation of one's writing is a complex, subjective activity. Compositionists have struggled for decades to determine how to best evaluate student writing. As mentioned in the FIPSE proposal, we are more sensitive to the subjective nature of assessment than ever before. We have lost faith in norm-referenced instruments as a means to assess writing; we have problematized simplistic definitions of good writing as culturally, historically, and economically determined.

We have learned that holistically scored essays, while inexpensive to conduct, fail to provide us with the information that we need to determine whether students are improving as writers, writing assignments are well constructed, research is called for in student documents, and so forth. "Pre" and "post" texts focus on evaluating essays written hastily and with little revision. We have also learned that different exam topics and rhetorical registers affect students choice of syntax, organization, and development. Even with extensive training, those who rate the compositions often have difficulty sorting writing into simplistic categories.

Following a five-year assessment of undergraduate student writing at the University of Washington, Catharine Beyer concluded that pre and post assessment is comparable to reading the TV Guide as a means of evaluating the content of television dramas. But use of this method makes assessment dangerous, as well as useless. Beyer is not alone in her criticism. Many cultural critics and compositionists blame such assessment approaches for promoting illiteracy, noting that assessment can drive the curriculum to emphasize form over content--more specifically, the five paragraph theme.

While compositionists are more aware of the subjective nature of interpretation, they still understand the desire to assess student writing. Within the last decade, compositionists have advocated portfolio assessment as a viable alternative to earlier measures. While portfolios have been used in various ways, they are generally collections of student work. Some of the writing samples in portfolios are short, in-class activities while others are longer projects, including group-work projects and research-based projects. Advocates for this form of assessment argue that portfolios offer the best possible means of identifying the amount of writing that students are composing, as well as what contexts, audience, purposes, and voices students are employing, and what research skills and disciplinary conventions assignments engage. However, even advocates of portfolios still acknowledge the postmodern quandary--the subjective nature of interpretation, the tendency of those who rate the compositions to weigh or apply evaluative criteria differently, and the debate over standards of good writing.

While we understand that portfolio evaluations cannot provide us with objective proof of improved student writing, we believe that portfolio assessment provides the most viable means of understanding how students develop as writers over two years, and how well writing was being used to promote student learning. As discussed in the FIPSE proposal, we asked Learning Community students to maintain a portfolio of their work throughout their involvement in the community. Students were requested to include their LC syllabi, in-class essays, and out-of-class essays. Major projects that were written online (on listservs or MOOS) were to be printed and placed in the portfolio. Each time a major paper was due, we asked students to turn in two copies--one of which was kept and left unmarked so that we could have a clean copy for assessment at the end of each year.

At the conclusion of years 1 and 2, we asked students and faculty to conduct an assessment of their portfolios. Below is a review of our assessment procedures.

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Student Assessment

At the completion of their freshman and sophomore year, we asked the students to reread and reconsider the essays in their portfolios. Students were then asked to write a reflective, five-page argument that addressed the following questions:

1. Summarize the number of in-class and out-of class essays you wrote during the semester.
   
   
2. What are your major strengths as a writer?
   
   
3. What are your major weaknesses as a writer?
   
   
4. How have your writing strengths and weaknesses evolved over the past year?
   
   
5. Which are your strongest and weakest papers? Why?
   
   
6. What exercises did you learn the most from? Why?
   
   
7. How much of the writing occurred online or involved multimedia?
   
   
8. What exercises were least valuable to your writing improvement?
   
   
9. Did the LC professors introduce you to the conventions of writing in their disciplines, such as science, history, and mathematics?
   
   
10. Has your participation in the LC influenced the ways in which you used writing to understand and recall information?
    
    

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Faculty Assessment

At the completion of their freshman and sophomore year, we asked five faculty members from five distinct disciplines (science, math, history, English, and fine arts) to evaluate 10 portfolios from each LC. We chose faculty from different disciplines because we assumed that disciplinary expertise was required to determine whether students were accounting for disciplinary conventions for researching, reporting, and citing evidence, and disciplinary conventions for organizing discourse. The portfolios of student work were clean--that is, they did not include grades or teachers' comments.

All five faculty members use the criteria outlined in Table 2 in assessing the portfolios. They will then rank the portfolios as P+, P, P-, F. If available, the same portfolios will be used in Year 2.