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  • Towards an Ethics of Writing Placement
  • Gracemarie Mike

The increasing diversity of college student populations is hardly news to most in the business of higher education. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports an overall increase of 38% in enrollment from 1999 to 2009, an almost 30% jump from the previous ten-year period. Additionally, enrollment for minorities has jumped nearly 20% since the 1970s and more than 6% within the last eight years, the result of a continued push to make higher education more accessible to students of various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds ("Fast Facts"). More recently, the economy has played a significant role in spurring more students to seek college degrees. Within the last several years, enrollment has grown over 27% for students over the age of 25 ("Fast Facts"). These older, nontraditional students are attending college to gain the credentials they need to increase their chances of employment, and younger students are seeing that a college degree is crucial for ensuring career paths are open to them.

These changing student demographics have now made it more important than ever for institutions of higher education to examine the role they play in mediating student access to college degrees. One particular place where this accessibility comes into question is at the very beginning of students' college careers—placement into First-Year Composition (FYC) courses. Even though many scholars have discussed the gatekeeping function of FYC (i.e., to ensure that those who have passed FYC courses are prepared for both college and "real-world" writing), the idea of FYC as a speed bump or barrier to a college degree has not been discussed as widely in academic contexts. Outside academia, however, this issue is gaining attention. As a part of Washington Monthly's 2011 "College Guide," Susan Headden, in her article "How the Other Half Tests," recounts the story of Monica Dekany, a non-traditional student who was placed in remedial courses for English and mathematics based on the scores she received from the ACCUPLACER placement exam, despite having already passed many college courses earlier in her life. However much her life experiences might have demonstrated that her level of ability was far above the level of developmental courses, Dekany had no other option but to accept remedial placement. As a result, Headden writes, "Remediation cost [Dekany] several thousand dollars and set her education and her career back by a year" (par. 4).

Stories such as Dekany's make clear that assessors need to take into account a range of financial and personal consequences of the writing [End Page 51] placement programs they design. Given this pressure to ensure that placement not only "works" from an institutional standpoint but that it is also as beneficial to students as possible, we need to begin developing and evaluating our placement practices through the lens of ethics, a term proposed by Patricia Lynne for application to writing assessment. Ethics can enrich our current study of placement by allowing us to ask very basic questions, such as "Is this method right or wrong?" and "Is this method good or bad?," that the four terms typically used in writing placement discussion—validity, reliability, predictability, and satisfaction—do not inherently encourage. By considering both the immediate and long-range personal, institutional, and social consequences of placement through ethical inquiry, we can begin an open and honest dialogue about the role of assessment in higher education and the ways in which we can alter it to ensure it is a positive, productive practice.

Situating Ethics in Writing Placement

Looking at the literature on assessment, we see that validity and reliability are two terms frequently used to examine placement methods. In her article "Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment," Kathleen Blake Yancey notes that one way to understand the evolution of writing assessment is to look at it as "the story of back-and-forth shifts between these concepts [validity and reliability]" (484). She then describes what she sees as "waves" of testing in assessment, with "reliable" multiple-choice tests being used prominently during the first wave, "valid" direct tests of student writing gaining popularity in the second wave (489), and relatively reliable...

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