This article addresses the debate on college literacy achievement by focusing on teacher education students. In addition to acquiring the academic tools for teaching, many of those students might need to remediate their literacy gaps while mastering graduate-level academic writing skills. This study inquired into variables that might help predict students' writing performance and thus inform program development. A quantitative strand examined the relationship between undergraduate grade point average, ranking of undergraduate institution attended, educational attainment of the parents, and actual writing performance as measured by the grade assigned to a prompt. A qualitative strand inquired into students' beliefs about their writing skills, comparing those to the outcomes of the prompt. Findings indicated that grade point average and ranking of the undergraduate institution attended can be significant predictors of writing performance but that students' beliefs about their own writing did not forecast actual writing performance. (Contains 1 table.)