Ensuring that students graduate from post-secondary institutions with good writing skills presents two related challenges: assessment of writing and the teaching of writing. In this essay I want to address a commonly-used solu-tion to these twin challenges: the administration of an institution-wide compe-tence test to place students in WAC courses. I will begin with some of the reasons that this combination of a writing competence test and mandatory WAC courses is an attractive, and therefore commonly used, solution to this challenge of both certifying writing skills and educating those who do not earn certification. In the remainder of the essay, however, I will use a case study of the University of Calgary, and to a lesser extent Laurentian University, to illustrate some serious dangers of this relationship. I don’t want to suggest that competence testing and WAC can never exist in harmony. Like all WAC stories, the stories of the University of Calgary and of Laurentian are enmeshed in local politics that could well be different elsewhere. There may be ways to avoid the pitfalls I describe. But I will be quite candid: my experience has led me to become soured on the idea of combining institution-wide competence testing and WAC. I believe that their seemingly complementary approaches to what appears to be the same problem mask some deeply divided pedagogical assumptions that threaten to undermine the benefits of a WAC program, leading me finally to advise those who would contemplate such a potentially Faustian bargain to use extreme caution or avoid it altogether. I will end with a brief look at an alternative way of gaining traction on the difficult problem of ensuring students graduate with adequate writing pro-ficiency—first year seminars. In first-year seminars students learn and practice academic writing in a content-specific environment, and instructors are less apt to feel burdened by low-performing writers than in a course that links in-struction to universal testing. Why Combining Testing and WAC Looks Attractive Let us set to one side for a moment all the pedagogical and theoretical arguments for and against institution-wide writing competence testing (though I will come back to these arguments briefly later in this essay), and assume for

Writing Across the Curriculum places considerable demands not only upon the students in writing intensive courses, but also on the writing center staff to whom they go for help. This paper looks at some of the problems raised by tutors in this situation, and presents a case study in which such problems are negotiated in the course of a consultation between a student and a tutor. The kinds of revision resulting from this process are explored for the light they can throw on the relationship between language and content, as well as the relationships among discipline teachers, tutors, students, and the students’ texts. One aim of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that every teacher should be a writing teacher. However, while WAC assignments provide opportunities to write, the work of helping students to do it often falls to tutors in writing centers; and both tutors and teachers have expressed uneasiness about such consultations for a number of reasons. First, WAC assignments can challenge the tutors’ priority of respecting students’ ownership of their texts. What does it mean to own your text if you are writing on a topic set by somebody else, drawing on other people’s ideas, and conforming to conventions of structure and voice imposed by a discipline? Conventions of one sort or another have always surrounded writing, and even students’ “personal” writing is often largely a matter of reproducing commonplaces (see, e.g., Bartholemae). However, it is in the context of writing for unfamiliar disciplines that students and tutors are forced to confront these issues, identify the constraints and opportunities peculiar to writing in each discipline, and work within them. This brings

You write what you, what you understand, what you know, right? About the topic or about the concepts...--Lata, a community college nursing student in a writing-intensive course Still in the relatively early stages of our college’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative, we have begun a study to assess its impact. As members of the WAC committee, full-time instructors in two of the college’s career programs (human services and early childhood respec-tively), and qualitative researchers, we were charged with the task of de-veloping and implementing the study. In our urban community college we often conduct interdisciplinary work, and both the WAC program and committee reflect that. The WAC committee has enlisted support for WAC from the variety of career programs and liberal arts departments. Our role as assessors is to look at and learn from the way instructors are imple-menting WAC. Walvoord & Anderson (1998) state that assessors are not external imposers of something brand new but in-vestigators, ethnographers, and facilitators. The assessor’s approach is not to get people to do assessment, but to examine how people teach and assess critical thinking, and to help them improve. (pp.150-