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This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.
In many ways, our writing placement story is a familiar one. Te University of California (UC), one of the largest public research university systems in the United States, has only one shared graduation requirement: the Entry-Level Writing Requirement (ELWR), formerly Subject A, which the feld would likely recognize as preparatory to frst-year composition (see Berlin; Connors; Crowley; Rose; Shaughnessy; and Soliday for histories of such requirements in US higher education; see Stanley for more on Subject A in the UC). Most UC students fulfll the ELWR through standardized test scores or AP credits.1 Since 1986, incoming frst-year UC students who arrived without the ELWR fulfllment have taken a pass/fail timed writing exam-the Analytical Writing Placement Exam (AWPE)-which asks students to demonstrate reading comprehension by explaining the main points of a passage and writing an essay that agrees or disagrees with those points (for more information on the exam, see UCOP).
System-wide criticism of the AWPE is long standing, with questions about the exam's validity, its historic use for assessing profciency rather than placement (see debates about timed writing, including Huot; O'Neill; White; and Yancey), and its inability to account for the local paradigms of academic writing across UC campuses. Te AWPE perpetuated a current-traditionalist writing paradigm that is at odds with the writing cultures that UC writing programs and faculty work hard to create-writing cultures premised in Writing Across the Curriculum, writing as thinking, and practices that are refective of our memberships in particular discourse communities and disciplines. Critics of the...