On July 26, 1602, a play entitledThe Revenge of Hamlet Prince [of] Denmarkwas entered in the Stationers’ Register by the printer James Roberts. The play was printed in 1604, most probably from the author’s own manuscript. The existence of an unauthorized text published in 1603 written by “William Shake-speare” gives a clue to the first performance of the play in 1601. That text’s reference to children’s acting companies, then in great popularity, also provides some evidence for the play’s completion by mid-1601, with performance soon following (Edwards 1985).

The series of tenuous claims about the date of completion...

The national investment in composition instruction remains huge, despite recent budget cuts throughout the educational system. At the high-school level, we can count 358,136 students taking the advanced placement examination in English language and composition (College Board 2013, Table 9), the better-prepared tip of a population concerned with entry-level college writing. The National Center for Education Statistics (2012; Hussar and Bailey 2008, Fig. C) reports that total enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased 23 percent from 1992 to 2006. Between 2006 and 2017, a period of only eleven years, enrollment is projected to top at least 19.4 million students, almost all...

In chapter 1, we identified components of a successful writing program, beginning with a defined construct model and ending with an overall strategic plan. Because the assessment of student learning is a key element in writing program assessment, in this chapter we turn to case studies conducted by the authors on student performance in three curricular areas: preenrollment placement and first-year placement; writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID); and graduate studies. We begin by reviewing the development of a program-wide writing assessment at Louisiana State University (LSU). We then turn to WAC and WID programs...

If we are to think clearly about writing program assessment, we need to untangle it from the issues involved with assessing the writing of individual students and assessing the outcomes of particular writing courses. This is no easy matter since the objective of writing programs is to improve the writing of individual students and the outcomes of writing courses. Each of these assessments poses its own challenges, which accumulate as we move from the student to the program—or, to try our new vocabulary, as we use the framework of constructive alignment to map the writing construct from the particular...

In the introduction to this book, we called attention to the code used by the Classification of Instructional Programs for our field. In turn, we have used the termrhetoric and composition/writing studies(23.13) to refer to our professional orientation. Before providing an educational measurement perspective on the assessment of writing programs, it is important to examine a seemingly insignificant detail that accounts for many of our attitudes toward assessment: 23.13 (the four digits that represent intermediate groupings of programs) is categorized as part of English language and literature/letters (CIP code 23, the most general group of related programs). Although...

When White (2001) wrote “The Opening of the Modern Era of Writing Assessment: A Narrative,” which was published inCollege English, he ended it with this prediction:

As we enter the new century, we will be fighting old battles in new ways. The modern era of writing assessment has placed us at last on the right side of a series of social issues: for instance, we see writing assessment as a way to help students succeed rather than a way to screen out the undeserving, its more traditional use. We also see writing assessment as closely related to the teaching...