A study designed to examine the differences in quality ratings that 20 teachers in each of three senior high school curricular areas (business, English/social studies, and mathematics/science) gave to samples of written argument by college freshmen also investigated the relationship between the three groups of quality ratings and eight syntactic and mechanics-of-writing variables (such as words/T-unit and total number of words). Among the results of the study were that (1) the high school teachers, trained in different subject areas, displayed a high degree of consistency in rating college freshman writing; (2) English/social studies and mathematics/science teacher groups agreed more with each other than either did with the business teacher group, which gave the lowest quality scores; (3) there were high correlations among all the various mean quality ratings of the groups as well as between each separate mean rating and the number of words and the number of free modifiers the students wrote, while the opposite was evident for the syntactic complexity measures; and (4) the length of the compositions themselves and their freedom from errors in diction, spelling, and punctuation contributed most to the accountable variance. (AEA)