Sensing an urgency among faculty and administrators to design writing assessment programs, this book presents a programmatic approach to writing assessment that combines holistic scoring with a programmatic emphasis and on-going program evaluation. The program described in the book was successfully conducted with rising juniors at a rural university of just under 6,900 students and is generalizable to the extent that an institution is committed to undertaking a program of writing assessment. Each chapter in the book closes with questions designed to help faculty from across the curriculum develop their own assessment programs and notes on significant works in assessment. Chapters in the book are: (1) Decisions in Designing Writing Assessment Programs; (2) Writing Assessment: A Brief History of Twentieth-Century American Practices; (3) Toward the Measurement of Levels of Literacy; (4) Envisioning the Assessment Process; (5) Designing and Pretesting Prompts; (6) Administering the Assessment; (7) Selecting Sample Training Papers; (8) Administering the Reading; (9) Collecting, Analyzing, and Reporting Data; (10) The Junior Level Basic Writing Course; and (11) Closing Comments. Contains 202 references. (RS)