One of the effects of the writing-as-process movement has been to change the way many teachers evaluate student writing. While most teachers of writing still assign grades to papers at some point in the course of instruction, the emphasis has shifted from summative to formative evaluation, or, in the language of process advocates, from a teacher's role as judge to one of coach. Nancy Sommers and others have taught us that evaluative comments on students' texts should serve as aids in revising rather than as justifications of particular grades. While many of us have been influenced by these discussions, the literature on writing evaluation restricts the process of evaluation to the means of evaluation, largely teachers' and peers' responses to student writing. This literature tends to assume that a broad consensus exists about what constitutes good writing and that we can recognize good writing when we see it. Absent from most current discussions of evaluation is an older notion of process reflected in the etymology of the term. The Latin roots of evaluation are ex + VALUE-to be "out of" or "from" value. Each judgment of value is made from some notion of value, usually a notion that is widely shared within a culture. College writing research in the disciplinary period which began, roughly, in the mid 1960s has not told us much about exactly what it is that teachers value in student writing. Researchers who have used statistical methodologies to address this question have thrown little light on the issue. The only consistent finding has been that the length of essays is associated with judgments of quality. 1 Textbooks, by and large, are of little help because they speak of good writing in general terms such as those Michael Adelstein and Jean Pival use to define good writing: "clear," "concise," "effective," "interesting," and projecting "the authentic voice of the writer" (6). And guidelines published by English departments-at least at places where I've taught-are even less specific. An "A" paper is one that "displays unusual competence"; hence, an "A" paper is an "A" paper. One explanation of why definitions of good writing are either circular or