Issues of credibility and quality, on top of already confused senators at the Academic Senate meetings, make a vote on potential changes to the Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR) difficult.
The Cal State Long Beach Academic Senate’s bewilderment is mostly attributed to its having to review more than one proposal at a time for GWAR revisions — one from the GWAR committee and one from Boak Ferris, an English lecturer and former GWAR coordinator for almost five years — which is not typical of Academic Senate procedure.
A final vote on proposed changes to how students go about meeting the GWAR is expected to take place at the end of the semester, according to Academic Senate Chair Praveen Soni.
The current GWAR policy, approved in 2004, requires students to attain a passing score on either the Writing Proficiency Exam (WPE) or a reviewed writing portfolio submitted by a student after having taken one of six semester-long GWAR-approved courses.
According to the CSULB website, the pass rate for the 2007-2008 WPE was a total of almost 82 percent, and the average pass-rate for the GWAR course portfolio since fall 2005 is about 95 percent.
Under the current policy, each WPE essay or writing portfolio is reviewed and scored by a panel of three readers.
The GWAR committee proposal would reduce the number of portfolio readers from three to one. Linda Sarbo, the current GWAR coordinator, said the GWAR committee found the assigning of three readers to each portfolio to be “unnecessary” and an “overkill.”
With the committee’s proposal, the instructor of the GWAR-approved course would become the sole reader.
The alternate proposal maintains the regulation requiring three readers to review GWAR course portfolios.
The GWAR committee sees it as an advantage for students, especially non-native English speakers, to be graded by their own instructor because they’ve seen the work that has gone into the portfolio.
In order to maintain standards, a representative sample portfolio of each instructor’s reviews would be examined for “quality assurance,” Sarbo said.
She also deemed this as a more “scientific way of examining the portfolios.”
Ferris disagrees with this reasoning, saying that the WPE and the GWAR supplemental course should be uniform and equal, and that one should not be harder than the other.
“That’s just not fair,” Ferris said.
He said he would hope that instructors would be fair and unbiased in grading the portfolios if it were only one instructor assessing the portfolio but, he added, “Teachers get fond of students and the opposite can happen … either way the temptation is to not be fair.”
Ferris said he feels the current requirements ensure a more “honest assessment” and “objective view” in the portfolio-grading process.
Another main issue brought up by the alternate proposal is the disparity between WPE scores for non-native English speakers and native English speakers.
Of the 3,509 non-native English speakers who took the WPE in the 2007-2008 school year, about 60 percent passed, according to the website, and of the 6,582 native English speakers, 94 percent passed.
The alternate proposal outlines several regulations for faculty scorers and course instructors, one of which is the “participation and inclusion of qualified faculty scorers who can differentiate … between English fluency and syntactical errors that interfere with students demonstrating upper-division writing skills competence from those fluency errors that do not so interfere.”
While the GWAR committee policy does not ignore this issue, it does not set any clear regulations for non-native English speakers. Through its proposal, the GWAR committee would make the GWAR course portfolio option available to students before attempting the WPE.
An additional change outlined in the GWAR committee’s proposal is to create “a network of advisers,” Sarbo said, where students would have easier access to GWAR advisers.
She said they will look at the feasibility of placing an adviser in each department.
There is also talk of adding a fee to the GWAR-certified course if it is being taken in order to fulfill the GWAR.
Currently, students must pay a fee in order to take the WPE, whereas no fee is charged for the portfolio evaluation in the GWAR-certified courses.
The GWAR committee’s proposal outlines that, “Prior to the end of the second week of instruction, students enrolled in the approved writing-intensive course must indicate that they wish to use the course to fulfill the GWAR and must pay the required fee, if applicable.”
If this clause passes, the proposal would then go to the Student Fee Advisory Committee (SFAC) before a fee can actually be established. The $25 proposed fee was discussed at the Jan. 16 SFAC meeting. The fee would potentially be named the Graduate Writing Assessment Program Fee and would be considered an assessment fee, and not an exam fee.
This money could potentially pay the scorers and instructors doing the portfolio and exam assessments.
The Academic Senate, at the March 12 meeting, decided to perfect each policy in its own domain, and will then decide which policy best suits CSULB, exclusively of the other.
“My intention is that both policies are kept separate,” said Christopher Chavez, Associated Students Inc. vice president and member of the Curriculum and Educational Policy Council (CEPC).
The CEPC serves as the primary advisers to the Academic Senate and university administration on issues surrounding educational policies, and any approved changes to policy must go through this council.
Soni said that, with this particular policy, some senators are wondering why an alternate proposal is being brought forth to the Academic Senate.
Chavez did not say he was one of these senators, but said he “would have preferred to see that process take place” in regards to bringing only one proposal to the senate.
Chavez said Ferris, who has been carrying the alternate proposal through to the Academic Senate, worked with the sub-counsel committee for GWAR, but that he is not aware of Ferris’s attending the GWAR committee meetings, “from what [he has] seen.”
Ferris could not be reached for a comment on attendance to the GWAR committee meetings.
Ferris said he consulted faculty from different departments, especially those who deal with non-native English speaking students, and non-native students as well.
The GWAR committee is made up of faculty and student representatives. Sarbo said that two off-campus officials from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Cal State San Bernadino, who are “irrefutably experts on the GWAR,” reviewed the current CSULB GWAR policy.
Academic Senate meets Thursday to continue its discussion on the GWAR policies.
Chelsea Robertson contributed to this report.