Collaboratively Building Our SSP Scholarship (Because Placement is Still Everyone's Business)

Journal of Writing Assessment 18(1)We had been working together for quite a while on student self-placement (SSP) when we put out the call for the JWA 2024 special issue (Pantelides & Whittig, 2024).Although we had scholarship to support us, and excellent regional communities, we had been so focused on our own tools and their various idiosyncrasies that when the many excellent proposals came in, it was the balm that we had long needed.Placement reform was definitely in the air.So many different kinds of institutions were using SSP, and they each had their own compelling narratives, and they each had their own frustrating paths, and they each had their own labor, data collection, and deadline challenges to contend with.We wanted to capture all of their stories because we really need them: stories from community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, southern comprehensives, R2s, HSIs, and more across the country.We are still missing so many of these stories.Only a year later, we fear there is a turning away from SSP and, for a variety of reasons (state mandates, ease), a returning to single measure standardized tests for placement.The winds are changing.Although there may be a shared feeling among advocates that SSP is here to stay, the approach is often still articulated as an alternative to more traditional placement methods.Many of us work with colleagues who remain skeptical (or even fearful) of SSP, and some public institutions in Utah with successful DSP models have had to rethink their approach as state policies have undercut their ability to use their well-researched empirically effective tool.Last year, when we wrote that "placement is everyone's business, " we were being somewhat metaphorical, perhaps even a little hyperbolic (Pantelides & Whittig, 2024).But in the last year as we both moved into short-term Student Affairs roles, somewhat distant from our previous up-close, hands-on work with writing placement, we realized how literal the writing placement ecology is (in that there are so many important stakeholders impacting and impacted by the process across the university), how true our maxim was, and how much work we have to do in the future to better articulate placement ecology connections across the university, particularly in ways that effectively bridge Academic and Student Affairs.We marveled at how many of our respective colleagues in Student Affairs and Academic Affairs were unaware of related practices across our own campuses.Ruecker and colleagues (2017) helpfully explore how writing programs (and WPAs, and, we would argue, all folks involved in placement broadly) can increase our visibility and actively assert our role in student success and retention; placement may be an effective space for this, positioned as it is at the intersection of different institutional interests and activities.Increasing visibility means being able to articulate to people outside of writing studies what we know about placement.So, we reaffirm this statement with perhaps more fervor than we offered it before: Placement is everyone's business!And because it is, the more hands, the better.We know-from years of studying placement mechanisms-the ripple effects that different practices can have on an incoming student, on entire populations of students.We know that placement into developmental courses can delay a student's persistence and time to graduation (Bailey et al., 2010;Jaggars & Stacey, 2014; Nastal et al., 2022), but also that some student groups may benefit from these courses (Jaggars & Stacey, 2014); we know from our own experiences that students are often disheartened and confused by placements generated based on their SAT or ACT scores alone; we know that students who choose their placements are more satisfied with their courses than students who do not (Ferris et al., 2017;Ferris & Lombardi, 2020); we know that placement can be handled as a rhetorical opportunity to welcome, invite, and embrace students, rather than shut them out (Toth et al., 2024); we know that, given our changing understanding of validity, many of our previous placement mechanisms were based on flawed cognitive models of