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Doug, The WAC courses at Laurentian are primarily "content" courses and some of them do an excellent job of integrating writing into the learning of this content. However, other courses seem to position writing as an add-on component of the course. This can lead to a view of writing as separate from the learning of content. This attitude has been exacerbated, I think, because a) WAC courses are so strongly linked with the concept of "writing competency" (which the test is supposed to measure and b) because, until this year, only those students who had not yet achieved the graduation requirement of a writing competency score of 1 were named "WAC students" -- other students in the class were not seen as WAC students. In some cases, faculty have constucted whole separate assignments (or writing processes) and writing/grammar workshops for students who need their writing competency score of 1. Thus, although any student can enrol in a WAC course, up until this year only those students "lacking" a score of 1 were perceived as WAC students. I should emphasize that this is by no means the perception of all faculty, but it is fairly widespread in the university community. Fortunately, this year we have changed the policy so that all students in a WAC course are named WAC students regardless of their existing scores. However, some faculty have complained that this policy creates more work for them because by it they understand that they need to score the writing competency of every stuednt in their class -- and some WAC courses are very large (e.g., 50 - 100 students). But the distincition that I am really trying to emphasize is between writing competency and WAC -- i.e., that WAC entails a much bigger, richer concept of writing than the concept of writing competency. However, because the 2 terms have historically been conflated at Laurentian, it's hard to communicate this distinction effectively. The good news is that a number of WAC faculty with whom I've spoken in the last few months and with whom I've discussed this distinction seem more than happy to accept and promote it. Others, however, ... Because teaching a WAC course is voluntary and receives no official accreditation, it's hard to impose any substantial or extensive guidelines. Instead, we have fairly minimal requirements for a WAC course (e.g., that it include at least 2,500 words of written work and that it include formative as well as summative evaluation of writing -- I know that this latter requirement is not really being met in all courses, but my objective is to try to encourage change slowly rather than "come down heavy" -- if I or the Language Centre do the latter, we will alienate faculty whom we need.) In short, some WAC courses are being taught in creative,theoretically and practically sound ways by dedicated faculty; others are not. I hope that with ongoing, carefully targeted communication and follow up with WAC faculty, the latter courses will improve over time, or that we will develop other, stronger courses to take their place. One very encouraging thing is that a number of new faculty seem to be interested in WAC in the best senses of the term. Philippa Spoel [log in to unmask]