Assessment

The Politics of implementing Online Directed Self-Placement
Crusan nailed it. Let students figure it out (after we explain what the courses offer) and the department saves a bundle of money and time, plus, according to Crusan, it's equally if not more effective. As soon as I'm teaching again, this will be on top of the list of things to discuss at departmental meetings.

Investing in Assessment
For any of us who have taken the GRE or other timed essay exam, we know how ridiculous the setup is - we teach process writing and revision and feedback and then we're given 30 minutes to discuss whether war is more ethical now than it was in the past. "A single essay does not allow the assessment of the total range of a writer's ability because it does not provide opportunities for students to express themselves in more than a single genre for a single purpose," (225) so how about this, no more timed essays. They're artificial and even when students do well on them, it doesn't tell us enough about what they've learned or how they write.

Ferris (2003)
Here's where you're allowed to hate me. L2 seems to lag behind in terms of theory with L1. L1 gets (a good portion) of its ideas from literature scholarship; we appropriate it when appropriate. When we do come up with something for L1, L2 grabs it a decade later and finds problems, mostly because you can't substitute one context for another and expect everyting will stay the same. L1 research says how we should respond to writing (and sorry Ferris (1999), it ain't with grammar), but that's for L1 contexts. L2 is its own thing, it's so much more complex than L1 settings that we should be borrowing from you.