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Holy Christ, Cathy! Didn't anybody think of suing OISE or anything? I'm being facetious because I know that no-one has ever been successfully sued just for being stupid, but that testing system certainly does beat all. And on the face of it, it sort of looks intelligent. At least our test, be it ever so flawed, is marked by human beings and has disagreements settled by human beings. Incidentally, we have never gotten our reliability much bove 75%, and we're proud of it. We figure that the only way to get an essay test to score much above 75% reliability is to have a marking scheme that's so mechanical that it takes all human judgement out of the picture. Phillipa, I'm interested in your story, as it puts a new perspective on what a WI course can turn out to mean. I always thought of a WI course as any course in a content area which teaches primarily content but does so in the context of a lot of writing and thereby teaches writing more or less by-the-way, which is the best way to do it if it can be engineered that way. But if your WI courses are perceived as remedial, and students are not allowed to take them unless their writing is judged to be defective, then they must teach mostly writing and relatively little content. Otherwise it couldn't possibly matter what their writing skills are. Is it that the writing in the course somehow _takes over_ from the context, or is perceived to? Tell me more about WAC at Laurentian. Something isn't adding up for me here. And I sense a major pitfall that I may appreciate having been warned about.