Facilitating participatory processes in graduate leadership classrooms appears to be a natural precursor to students modeling the development of democratic environments in their future work. Doing so, however, might require the involvement of students in a variety of activities heretofore the domain of professors. One example of such a democratic activity is the involvement of students in the establishment of course assessment criteria. This study was designed to gain perspectives from students and faculty members who were involved in collaboratively determining performance criteria by which students were to be graded. In this paper, the authors take a look at several theoretical perspectives that influenced the study and then report on the study, delineate findings, and discuss implications. (Contains 1 table.)