Increasingly, students come to the university with a consumer mentality, which gives students a sense that they are entitled to negotiate their student positions within the university and the classroom. This article, using Directed Self-Placement as a sort of case study, considers the role student-centered assessments and pedagogies play in perpetuating this consumer role and theorizes that we are framing them in a way that makes us complicit. The article addresses questions about what to do as education becomes more consumer driven. What is a WPA--caught between concerns about good pedagogy and pressures from the administration to recruit and retain students--to do when faced with students who want to negotiate their positions in the first-year composition curriculum? And, how do we negotiate ourselves back into a position in which assessment standards and rigor are paramount, even in a consumer world?