In this article, I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an “assessment killjoy” (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing studies. From this foundation, I reflect on my attempts to grade more equitably. I discuss my pedagogical goals, which are grounded in intersectional feminist theory (hooks; Royster and Kirsch), standpoint theory (Harding), learning sciences (Hammond; Ross), and a robust model of the writing construct (White et al.), and analyze the consequences of exit portfolios, labor-based contract grading (Inoue), and specifications grading (Nilson) via this integrated framework.

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters, before and after extensive developmental education reform, the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

When we offer students engagement in the creation of the course, not only do we acknowledge that those in culturally minoritized positions are adept at deploying the same skills we seek to teach, but also we show that their lived experiences are valuable, necessary, and desirable within the classroom. This recognition opens a space in which students not only feel a sense of belonging but also create the terms of belonging. This article shares an evolving five-year and running process and offers an overview of how a community-based assessment practice grew from adapting (with students) labor-based grading coupled with self-directed writing.

This symposium documents an ongoing conversation between five faculty members from Portland Community College. The discussion explores what “equity-based assessment” means, grappling both with the reasons for adopting such approaches as contract grading, labor-based grading, and ungrading and with the challenges of implementing them in two-year colleges.

This Instructional Note is for two-year college instructors who have attended conference presentations and read articles about the benefits of ungrading and want to know more about the pragmatics of teaching and how the shift to alternative assessment will affect their work.

In this special issue introduction about alternative grading practices, we argue that stories from two-year colleges and other underrepresented institutions matter. As our title suggests, this special issue is an attempt to recognize the unrecognized and disrupt the dominant alternative assessment narrative. To meet the needs of all students, especially those whose journeys include two-year colleges, the field must find ways to elevate faculty voices from community colleges, technical colleges, and vocational colleges in conversations about pedagogical innovations, including grading.

Introducing an alternative grading framework to students can be a challenge. Instructors might encounter student resistance, confusion, and frustration. To better help students understand both why moving away from traditional grading practices is important and how the classroom’s alternative assessment system functions, this Instructional Note suggests centering dialogue, students’ histories with grades, and an overview of the classroom’s alternative grading practice during the first couple of weeks of class.

This article explores the connections between creating an equitable classroom and antiracist assessment. The article attempts to explain the impact of the equitable classroom on student apathy. Additionally, rigid concepts of “failing” under this equitable classroom model are interrogated. Finally, the article provides some insights into the limitations and pitfalls of the equitable classroom design.

A course model featuring scaffolded information literacy instruction and connection with a librarian improves online students’ attitudes about library sources and the value of research in the writing process.

This article demonstrates the important role that student researchers play in developing two-year college writing center assessment. As part of a tutoring practicum assignment, students from Bristol Community College co-designed a survey that assessed the perceptions of students who do and do not utilize a writing center at their mid-sized community college. Students collected 865 responses between 2014 and 2015. This article provides a road map to developing student-led RAD research through a two-year college writing center and its attendant course; it also shares positive pedagogical and programmatic outcomes from the project.

Despite national efforts to accelerate students through precollegiate writing course sequences to transfer-level composition, questions persist regarding appropriate placement and the support needed for students to succeed. An analytical text-based writing assessment was administered to students across four levels of composition courses at a California community college. Differences in student writing scores between course levels and the relationship between writing score, course level, and high school GPA were examined. Key findings include (1) significant differences in average scores between the first precollegiate course and other courses in the sequence and (2) weak relationships between course level and high school GPA and assessment scores and high school GPA.

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Self-annotation forces students to build sideline commentary for their own writing. As a self-assessment strategy, annotation at every stage of the writing process turns underprepared writers into more confident decision makers and communicators.

Books reviewed: Assessing and Improving Student Writing in College: A Guide for Institutions, General Education, Departments, and Classrooms

This research examines the experiences of six incoming students at a public university in Northern California to investigate their rationale for self-placement into first-year composition and their perceptions of their choices at different points throughout their first semester of college.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

A Modest Proposal for the 21st Century Peter Dow Adams Computerized Evaluation of Writing: Senseless Savings Eric BatemanKicking the “Fast Assessment” Habit Carolyn Calhoon-DillahuntDr. Test Cracker, Meet John Henry James FreemanA Cautionary Tale Sharon Mitchler

A Response to Lindsey Harding’s “Writing beyond the Page: Reflective Essay as Box Composition” Rachel Ihara A Response to Rachel Ihara’s “Student Perspectives on Self-Assessment: Insights and Implications” Lindsey Harding

The article provides suggestions for using a grading contract/portfolio approach to assessing writing for introductory composition classes comprised of basic writers.

This article explores students’ responses to a formal self-assessment assignment, situating their views within the context of the texts they produced, identifying connections to scholarship on self reflection, and proposing a rethinking of pedagogical practices around reflective writing.

A program assessment project at our college suggests the importance of listening to every teacher’s account of the assessment practice and the value of ongoing conversation.

This essay reports on a systematic assessment of 239 feature articles published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College between 2001 and 2012. It notes gaps in the published research on two-year college English teaching and recommends areas offocus for future work in the field.

This case study of the authors’ process of curricular innovation, assessment, and redesign provides guidance to colleagues seeking to implement 21st century literacies into their own objectives for first-year composition courses.

The authors describe their attempt to devise a practical way to integrate critical thinking more overtly into the assessment of college writing across the disciplines.

An outcomes assessment project we conducted at our open admissions institution turned out to be considerably more enjoyable and worthwhile than we anticipated.

We offer here a critical assessment of our experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities—in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations we have together—to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making.

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Teacher-assessors face particular challenges when working with portfolios containing both revised and timed student writing.

College and high school writing teachers participated in an online assessment activity to build common understanding of standards.

An assessment project aimed at examining transfer of learning from English 101 to a subsequent psychology course provided insight on transfer and on student metacognition and also created a rich opportunity to exchange scholarship and ideas between disciplines.

This article describes a process of peer evaluation that is aimed at developing students’ sense of audience and at elevating the status of peer reviewers, whose opinions on successful writing are too often viewed as less trustworthy than those of their instructors.

This analysis of the Assessment Practices section of the national TYCA survey of writing programs examines recent trends in placement and exit practices at the two-year college.

In this article, an analysis and critique of one small but pedagogically significant component of classroom discourse (instructors’ use of long-familiar questioning routines in whole-group classroom discussion) is used to support the larger argument that analysis of classroom discourse at the college level offers many valuable ways to reflect on, and transform, our teaching.

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. We seek articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. We also publish articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of interest.

This article uses one basic writer’s experience with assessment as a vehicle to explore whether the assessment practices struggling writers encounter on their essays effectively usher them into academic discourse or simply scare them away from that ambition entirely.

Although writing instructors have a clear picture of how well our students can write by the end of a composition course, very rarely do we learn how well the students carry over the skills and strategies we teach them to the essays they write for other courses. I collected essays from other courses to determine how effectively students transfer the proficiencies of our writing courses to their other classes and surveyed them about their experiences as college writers. Through this project I was able to develop a new assessment plan for my department.

Three approaches—engaging first-year writers in naming strengths and weaker areas, determining descriptors that fit their various compositions, and applying a rubric that details all the grade-determinant components—serve to give students the vocabulary they need to wrap their voices around words and to describe their learning.

An authentic assessment embedded in a course becomes a teaching tool integral to the aims of the course, not simply a mandated test.

Drawing from the theories of Paulo Freire, Patricia Bizzell, and Ira Shor, this article describes a five-year ongoing classroom research project that examines the use of peer evaluation as a process for teaching academic discourse. The findings of the project suggest a critical and democratic pedagogical antidote to the national “standards” movement.

This article examines the ideological assumptions and practical consequences of recent state and federal attempts to standardize writing instruction at the secondary level, and it suggests alternative forms of assessment and classroom research available to teachers of composition in high school and college.

This article describes midterm assessment techniques that helped students tap into their process as emerging writers, and how the author used this feedback to realign the course at a pivotal time to reach resistant students.

Unexpected and most welcome is the discovery that technology-mediated teacher evaluation can increase our access to our students’ world and help us be more responsive to their needs.

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Discusses how current scholarship argues against one-shot, high-stakes writing tasks. Presents work from students that were part of a team-taught curriculum that coordinated writing and reading classes. Designs activities that would provide a core of material for students to draw on in their final testing situations.

Suggests that when teachers use student self-assessment to learn more about the contexts of student writing, they can respond more effectively. Argues that teachers need to (1) develop and use a variety of context-gathering tools; (2) actively solicit information about the contexts informing the production of student texts; and (3) use this information to avoid missing underlying problems.

Describes a “distant service learning” unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide criteria), and assessing student impact and impact on the nonprofit organization.

Describes computer-software programs that “read” and score college-placement essays. Argues they may impress administrators, but they also (1) marginalize students by disregarding what they have to say; (2) disregard decades of research on the writing process; and (3) ignore faculty’s professional expertise. Argues assessment practices should be guided by theoretical soundness and sensitivity to issues affecting real people.

Describes how three faculty members created a learning community at a nonresidential campus by creating and teaching a linked block of three core-curriculum courses (Composition 1, Speech Communication, and Cultural Anthropology) for incoming freshman students. Relates first-day class activities, describes the linking of assignments and communal learning, and discusses assessment. Notes excellent student retention, and student and teacher enthusiasm.

Shares freshman-composition students’ stories about portfolio assessment (interviewing students at length three times during the semester), to examine ways students understand portfolios, how portfolios work, and why sometimes they do not. Suggests concerns relevant to implementing department-wide competency portfolios. Argues that community colleges may be better situated than large universities to reap the benefits of portfolios.