If students get in and through our first-year writing programs, the chances that they will graduate and share in the goods of our society are strong. When we try to put entering students in the classes that will challenge them, yet allow them to succeed, we are acting as benign gatekeepers, but gatekeepers nonetheless. Society has given us a heavy responsibility. While I have solutions to propose for some of these assessment problems, my principle goal is to clarify the issues that lie behind them, so they we can think clearly about the practices that make sense in our particular institutions. I intend to disentangle the concepts and conflicting practices that make this aspect of writing assessment particularly burdensome. Instead, I will focus on the testing of students for various other purposes beyond a single classroom. In recent years, program assessment has received a good bit of specialized attention (see, for example, Haswell, Huot and Schendel, White, "The Rhetorical Problem"), so I will not deal with it here.
* This problem often blends into program assessment, another assessment issue of great importance for writing programs, and another topic about which most WPAs know little. The single most vexing issue that WPAs have to deal with is the endless writing assessments of students for program purposes, from placement of entering students to certification of graduating seniors.