Why are the changes in the assessment of the writing intensive requirement taking place now?
There has been an assessment reporting requirement in place from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) since 1987. General education has been a part of that requirement from the beginning. Once writing intensive courses were added to the Core Curriculum, as our general education courses are known, they were automatically added to the assessment cycle for Core Curriculum courses. Two years ago the assessment of the WI courses was completed after an exhausting amount of work by the Core Curriculum Committee. Several things were apparent: the focus of assessment, by necessity, was more on process than written product; the approach used to assess the other core courses was too time consuming for all involved to continue in the same manner; assessing WI courses, which are based in the major, is fundamentally different from assessing core courses meeting general education requirements; and the programs often have writing scattered throughout the major rather than restric
