Multifaceted Equity: Critiquing a First-Year Writing Assessment through Curricular, Performance, and Reliability Lenses

This article examines whether a college’s new portfolio-based first-year writing assessment process is equitable. We build on the existing literature by arguing that equity must be assessed through multiple, complementary facets within the writing assessment ecology. We present and operationalize three lenses through which to examine the equity of a first-year writing assessment process. The curricular lens shows that the new writing assessment is more aligned with and improved the classroom pedagogy of our first-year seminars. The performance lens shows the ongoing disparities between students across demographic backgrounds. Finally, the reliability lens reveals faculty differences in how they interpret the writing rubric. We conclude that while the new portfolio-based writing assessment is more equitable, it is also constrained by institutional structures and systems of power that prevent it from being equitable, period.