ABSTRACT

There are two exciting and potentially controversial perspectives on assessment taken by Jablonski and Nagelhout that should be the subject of conversation for all professional writing program administrators and faculty. Making a commitment to program assessment of the type that Jablonski and Nagelhout describe is perhaps easy to do, but tough to keep up on an ongoing basis. And one reason why it is tough to keep is the same reason Jablonski and Nagelhout give as a rationale for making such assessment mandatory: "a writing program is a complex curricular system of students and teachers". Jablonski and Naglehout's answer to this last question is to look at the online system. In effect, they suggest that "the system" in the abstract and "the system" created as an online course-management and delivery resource for teachers and students can be the same thing for the purposes of programwide assessment.