After toying around with the titular question, White points out that college level writing is like pornography - "a term with little instrinsic meaning, though in common enough use", meaning that while it is difficult to define, everyone assumes to know what it means. His paper focuses not on what he believes college level writing should be, but rather what college assessment assumes it to be, analyzing various assessment standards to discover thier assumptions on the matter. Of course, there are problems with this sort of analysis, one being that any assessment analyzed only produces conclusions at the campus using said assessment.
He first looks at a scoring guide developed in 1988 by the California State University system; after analyzing the criterion he reaches the concluson that, according to the scoring guide, college level writing pays careful attention to the question, has a full and organized development of a response and reasonable mechanical correctness give the nature of a first draft.
After giving two examples of student essays as well as the comments provided by the readers giving the grade, his conclusion is that college level writing as a term is meaningless since any definition we provide tell us more about the individual than the term. According the to him, the best way to define college level writing is to examine the criteria and sample writings provided by institutions.
However...aren't criteria decided upon by individuals?
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