Dangerous Partnerships: How Competence Testing Can Sabotage WAC

Abstract

Ensuring that students graduate from post-secondary institutions with good writing skills presents two related challenges: assessment of writing and the teaching of writing. In this essay I want to address a commonly-used solution to these twin challenges: the administration of an institution-wide competence test to place students in WAC courses. I will begin with some of the reasons that this combination of a writing competence test and mandatory WAC courses is an attractive, and therefore commonly used, solution to this challenge of both certifying writing skills and educating those who do not earn certification. In the remainder of the essay, however, I will use a case study of the University of Calgary, and to a lesser extent Laurentian University, to illustrate some serious dangers of this relationship. I don’t want to suggest that competence testing and WAC can never exist in harmony. Like all WAC stories, the stories of the University of Calgary and of Laurentian are enmeshed in local politics that could well be different elsewhere. There may be ways to avoid the pitfalls I describe. But I will be quite candid: my experience has led me to become soured on the idea of combining institution-wide competence testing and WAC. I believe that their seemingly complementary approaches to what appears to be the same problem mask some deeply divided pedagogical assumptions that threaten to undermine the benefits of a WAC program, leading me finally to advise those who would contemplate such a potentially Faustian bargain to use extreme caution or avoid it altogether. I will end with a brief look at an alternative way of gaining traction on the difficult problem of ensuring students graduate with adequate writing proficiency—first year seminars. In first-year seminars students learn and practice academic writing in a content-specific environment, and instructors are less apt to feel burdened by low-performing writers than in a course that links instruction to universal testing.