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The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program has developed a rigorous assessment project that will allow the University’s WAC curriculum to develop over time based on the data collected by the study. This study will determine whether distributing the responsibility of teaching writing across the curriculum is enabling students to improve their writing.  Departments needing additional support for improving student writing can also be identified, and the results of this assessment can be used to leverage additional funding for a sustained focus on the teaching of writing across the university. Furthermore, we will determine whether students perceive increased learning as a result of integrating writing-to-learn practices across the university. We have developed a web-based interface for collecting student drafts, revisions, and self-efficacy surveys, as well as norming and rating the papers, administering the system, and graphing data for departments to use to improve teaching of writing. Visit Student Writing Assessment for more information. 

Information for Departments

The WAC assessment is designed to measure the overall success of the WAC program at FAU. WAC is a University-mandated writing program intended to enhance the State of Florida’s Gordon Rule requirement for writing and communication. The WAC program guarantees that writing instruction is provided across the University and across the disciplines. Therefore, students have increased opportunities to improve their writing throughout their undergraduate careers. The WAC assessment is part of WAC’s annual program review.

Any department that has WAC-designated courses in its curriculum can potentially benefit from reviewing the results of the annual WAC assessment.

Departments can choose to work with WAC to set benchmarks for improvement over time and to identify strategies to support the overall quality of student writing.

Departments might also be interested in participating in the Writing Enriched Curriculum (WEC) initiative that aims to support writing in the upper division throughout a department’s major.

Please contact the WAC Director,  Sipai Klein   or the Assistant Director,  Julianne Zvolensky    for more information.

Â鶹¾«Æ·ÊÓƵWAC Assessment Interface

We provide here a set of screen snaps to demonstrate some of the features of our custom WAC assessment interface for evaluating student writing. Â鶹¾«Æ·ÊÓƵuses an 11 trait rubric to evaluate near-end-of-term thesis-driven writing. We typically use 25-30 raters to evalutate about 700 papers a year from a stratified random sample of WAC sections across the curriculum. Papers are collected each semester and then evaluated in early May each year. We typically norm for about a day and half before starting rating.  We spot norm after each set of ratings (40-150 papers per set). We rate for 3-4 days. Each paper is rated three times by three different raters. The three scores are processed as modes (keep two same scores and toss odd third score; 2, 2, 4 = 2) or averages (mean of three scores; split scores 1,2,3=2 or 2,3,4=3) to arrive at a single number for each trait. No students or facutly recieve individual scores. All scores are aggregated into course averages for a given year and presented to departments with multiple years of data to determine what benchmarks they want to set for the upcoming year and then they identify selected traits for pedagogical intervention. We have arrived at this system over the past 10 years of assessment and have found that it is extremely consistent and accurate. Take a look at several screen snaps below for additional information.

For more information on this interface, please contact Sipai Klein at kleins@fau.edu.