ABSTRACT
Many writing instructors are sceptical of unsupervised online/remote writing tests because of the many ways in which the resulting performance would not reflect students' true competence. With the forced shift to remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, three university second language (L2) writing instructors were required to find ways to increase the course's online tests' reliability, fairness, and impact. This chapter discusses the challenges – and compromises – faced by these instructors of an upper-division academic writing class for multilingual writers. Instructors made changes to the grading rubrics, to the approach used for students' delivery of the graded writing assignments, and they incorporated internet-based technologies to overcome the challenges created by remote assessment. This chapter reports on (i) the findings of a survey which asked students to reflect on their progress, (ii) students' final grades on the writing assessments done remotely, and (iii) their meeting of the student learning outcomes.
