the moment I've been waiting for

Here we go, some answers to that age-old question of assessment. What are we assessing? Beach and Probst have a brilliant suggestion: ask the students! Talk to them. Reading and writing is a dialogue. I love it. I wish I had looked at revising this way in my first year composition class.
Probst gives a general overview of the attitude that a teacher should have while evaluating student writing. He compares it to reading literature. The only difference is, with a student paper the reader has the opportunity to directly converse with the writer. Together, they can figure out what the meaning is, and even find a way to make that meaning more clear during revision.
Beach breaks down what exactly it is teachers should be looking for in students' essays. He classifies parts of the paper, not into intro/body/conclusion, but rather by characteristics that contribute to the writing style. The questions that really need to be answered involve the goal of the paper, the audience, and rhetorical strategies. If the opening paragraph seems "weak," the student is urged to figure out why and come up with a specific solution. This requires the writer to really look at what her goal is in writing the paper the way she did. I think that using the outline provided in Beach's essay is helpful for student essay revisions.
While reading these essays, I realized that both authors talk about the way that students are used to revising, and that the new revision strategies will need to be talked. That students will need to be "weaned" off the ways that they were accustomed to. My reaction to that is a simple, "duh!" This is life. As we develop skills and learn more about the theory behind them, it makes perfect sense that we will have to approach them in new, better ways. In math, we start out learning that you can't subtract 4 from 2. Or that you can't divide 7 by 8. And then we learn about negative numbers and fractions. But only once we've learned the basics. College writing is different from high school writing. I dont' know if that's good or bad, but that's the way it is. And there's nothing wrong with learning a new way to do things, if it makes our writing better.