ind the gap."The prerecorded caution on the London tube aims to protect fast-moving travelers from falling as they leave the train.That caution has metaphorical resonance for those of us who require students to go public with their writing and those of us who assess student writing, which is to say, all of us.Requiring students to make their writing public has become a given in many composition classrooms, while assessing student writing-in our overlapping roles as readers, graders, teachers, scholars, and administrators-has become the high-speed train of our professional work, hurtling us forward, sometimes without enough time to consider where we're going.Whether we mandate these activities (requiring students to exchange drafts), have them mandated (designing an assessment plan for our program) or, as in most cases, negotiate the ever-contested space between the two, these activities share the assumption that they are performed for the common educational good.Taken together, these three works ask us to reexamine our assumptions about assessing student writing, requiring students to make their writing public, and theo-Bet h K al i k off is assistant professor of writing studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts and SciencesProgram at the University of Washington, Tacoma.