ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the story of an assessment effort that crossed over department and division barriers in order to assess students’ learning as demonstrated in their writing. The College of San Mateo is a midsized California community college typical of other community colleges in the wide diversity of its students and their needs, the serious financial challenges that it faces, and its underdeveloped relationships to transfer institutions. The general education courses that our students take to transfer or complete associate degrees are dictated, to a large extent, by transfer articulation agreements. Assignments in a composition classroom seem, to some degree, arbitrary, based on the likes and dislikes of individual instructors. Participating institutions are organized to address specific themes important to the improvement of student learning, as well as the development and sustainability of a scholarship of teaching and learning.
