Elbow and Belanoff describe the use of portfolios as instruments for making pass/fail decisions about freshman university writers. Proficiency tests, used previously for determining whether or not students could be exited (or exempted) from introductory writing courses, consisted of hour-long, one-shot responses to single test-prompts. These proficiency exams do not offer a good idea of what students are really able to do with writing as it most often occurs under real-world circumstances. It also detracts from the writing practices that are stressed in writing instruction. In order to maintain standards of student writing, to remove the onus of pass/fail decisions from individual teachers (i.e., to lend a sense of objectivity to the evaluation process), and to bring classroom practice in line with assessment, SUNY instituted a portfolio system of semester end student evaluation.
The portfolio system consisted of three modes of writing -- a narrative, descriptive, expressive piece or informal essay; an academic essay organized around a main idea; and an academic essay that analyzes another academic essay. Each of these pieces was to be produced during the semester and revised, edited, reworked at will. In addition, one in-class essay was required (in order to provide comparison and maintain academic honesty).
Other teachers were used to rate the submitted portfolio selections (one at mid-term that could be used as a bench mark for students). Rating simply involved pass/fail judgments, actual course grades being determined by cumulative classroom variables (as determined by teachers). Judgments were therefore binary and holistic (with all four pieces being used to determine one decision). If one paper brought about failure, students could revise and resubmit. Consistent standards were maintained through mid-semester and semester end rater calibration sessions using sample pass/fail portfolios.
This evaluation process offers a degree of objectivity and standardization to writing assessment. It also demands a higher quality of effort and work from students (than did the proficiency exams). It moves away from norm-referenced standardization of testing and interpretation of student abilities, and moves towards criterion-referenced and mastery-based evaluation of student products. The actual work that students do for a class becomes the criteria by which they are graded, yet system-wide standards can be maintained through the use of trained class-external raters.
Problems include: more work for teachers as raters, more pressure on teachers to help students succeed, teaching to the few portfolio pieces, too much emphasis on revision (which is too easy on students). Strengths, however, include: reflection of the complexities of writing processes, the value of revision and critique from various perspectives, transformation of teacher into helper as opposed to judge, emphasis on the complexities of writing for unknown audiences.
