This article explores factors influencing classroom assessment approaches by analyzing survey data from 326 U.S. college instructors teaching business, communication, and composition. Business and communication instructors adopt nontraditional grading methods far less than composition instructors. Departmental culture and disciplinary norms are major influences, along with constraints like class size, time, and technology. The article argues that instructors can and should question departmental grading norms to develop assessment methods that enhance learning in interdisciplinary courses like business communication.

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.