Colleges and Universities Using Portfolios for Writing
Assessment Carleton College May 2004 Post-secondary institutions have been using portfolios to assess student writing for nearly two decades. SUNY Stonybrook established a portfolio exit examination for first-year writing in 1984. Miami University of Ohio started allowing placement into or exemption from first-year writing courses by portfolio submission in 1990. Washington State University began their junior-level placement assessment by portfolio in 1993. All these places, and many others since, have testified that formal portfolio assessment of writing is easy to imagine and defend but hard to design and implement. The literature on portfolio assessment at the college level is large (CompPile has over 500 cites for "portfolio" in the Search Terms or Title fields). It's full of theory, stories, and results. Publications can be frustrating, though, when one is looking for answers to specific, practical questions—questions about fees, delivery systems, legal language, prompt sheets, rating procedures, and so on. For solutions to such pragmatic and logistical enigmas it may be much more expedient to telephone or email someone at a school that has been doing portfolio assessment. But which are those places? The following list shows schools that currently use portfolios (paper or digital) to assess writing at the individual, course, or program level. Data were compiled from responses to a query on WPA-L in spring of 2003 and from a subset of the AAHE online portfolio database (the schools that use portfolios specifically for student evaluation). Additions are welcome; please e-mail Carol Rutz crutz@carleton.edu to add your school to this list.
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