Robin Murray has a concern about the proposed revisions to the Electronic Writing Portfolio.

Students will have to meet a minimum competent writing level or have to take part in writing programs designed to help a student with their writing under the proposed revisions to the EWP.

Murray, a faculty senate member, said the EWP is used for program assessment and is not meant to evaluate a student’s writing at Tuesday’s faculty senate meeting. She added that the evaluation of a student’s work goes on in the classroom.

Murray said moving the EWP to evaluate a student’s work changes that. She added the change also goes against research from the Writing Program Administration.

“What we would need to do, if we want to use the portfolio for evaluation, is to change it and make it an evaluation portfolio,” Murray said. “That would be fine.”

She said an evaluation portfolio would include the assignment sheet. She said the EWP proposed revisions do not include the addition of an evaluation portfolio.

“They really are just using the same portfolio for evaluation without changing it,” Murray said.

Murray voiced her concern to members of the committee in charge of revising the EWP during Tuesday’s faculty senate meeting.

Rebecca Throneburg and Karla Sanders, members of the Committee for the Assessment of Student Learning (CASL), spoke to the senate about the proposed changes to the EWP Tuesday.

In response to Murray’s concern, Throneburg said 80 percent of the faculty wanted some kind of evaluation and student remediation implemented in the EWP, when CASL surveyed the faculty last fall.

She added that changes can still be made to the proposed revisions if the faculty does not agree with some of the current recommendations.

Murray said an expert in constructing evaluation portfolios should be brought in to help with the EWP changes.

Under the current proposal, if a student’s first two papers do not meet the minimum competent writing level, the student would be subject to either a standardized test or tutoring designed to improve the student’s writing, Sanders said.

Sanders added graduate assistants from each department would tutor students with their writing.

Also, the professor teaching the class would score the submitted paper. The score would be based off a rubric designed for the EWP, not the grade that was given by the professor.

Sanders said a professor has a different set of criteria when grading papers. The EWP rubric would focus solely on writing.

Throneburg and Sanders spoke at the faculty senate meeting because they want feedback on the proposed revisions. They are in the process of visiting a variety of organizations around campus to see what they think of the proposed changes.

“There are several pieces where we could go this way and that way,” Throneburg said. “We would like to get your feedback on that.”

The new EWP could require three submissions from a student and allow papers from non-intensive writing courses to be submitted, Sanders said.

Throneburg said the first two papers have to be submitted before a student earns 60 credit hours so the remediation process can take affect. A registration hold will be placed on a student with 75 credit hours if he or she has not submitted both papers, she added.

The third paper would need to be submitted by the time a student earns 105 credit hours.