GE Writing Assessment Project
Assessment of writing in GE was guided by the overall GE Program Assessment process. GE Writing Assessment focused on direct assessment of student work already being produced for purposes of the courses involved.
Early in the assessment process, the Task Force had to make decisions regarding how many pieces of student work to examine, what sampling strategy would be followed for selecting student work, and what processes to use for recruiting and training readers. After several meetings of the Task Force, it quickly became evident that the assessment should offer a comprehensive and current "snapshot" of writing in GE, and that doing this necessitated the selecting a broad coverage of courses and reading a significant amount of student work. Because each piece of student work would be read by two independent readers, the Task Force faced a potentially overwhelming paper management problem.
To assist in the management of this process, the Task Force turned to an automated system for the storage, retrieval, assessment and analysis of student work, the STEPS program. STEPS allowed students to upload their work directly to a central server where faculty readers could then access their assigned papers from any site with an internet connection.