In 2000, Virginia's higher education institutions were required by the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV) to start assessing and reporting on written communication, one of six core competencies identified by the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Higher Education. Institutions developed their own plans, and GMU proposed ongoing department-based, faculty-led assessment of representative samples of student writing in the major according to a discipline-specific rubric developed in a holistic scoring workshop. (http://research.schev.edu/corecompetencies/GMU/comp_writing.asp)
In 2007, SCHEV issued a new mandate for "value-added assessment measures [that] indicate progress, or lack thereof, as a consequence of the student's institutional experience." In response, Mason incorporated our ongoing assessment procedures into a new plan, which includes a common definition of overall written competence that will be used for both pre- and post-assessments of student writing. The pre-assessment measures will focus on random samples of research-based essays written in introductory composition classes. The post-assessment will still take place in departments with papers from writing-intensive courses. Departmental faculty will still develop their own criteria for scoring papers (see checklist below), but all rubrics will include the same four-level rating for assessing overall competence in written communication. Pre-assessment will be conducted in fall 2008 while post-assessments will be ongoing in departments through 2013.