Scholarship on disability and writing assessment has infrequently included discussion of writing placement. This is surprising, as placement is an assessment mechanism–whether students assess their own writing readiness or are assessed by others–and there is much scholarship on disability and writing assessment (including this special issue).
\nAssessment of writing placement systems often focuses on how specific types of students succeed in the courses they eventually take, and to date, this research has not considered disabled students. While there may be challenges in gathering placement data on disabled students–as disability is often an ignored demographic in institutional data sets–the exclusion of disability in assessing placement systems is unjustified.
\nAt the same time, attending to disability in assessing writing placement systems should not be limited to assessing disabled students’ successes and failures. Rather than studying the outcomes for disabled students (which are limited by confounding variables), I suggest we flip the script and assess the inclusivity and accessibility of our placement systems, and by extension our writing programs and courses, by considering the presence of disability in our placement data. Assessing how and whether disability appears in writing placement data can be a starting point for writing programs looking to begin or extend conversations about disability and writing placement.
\nTo this end, I analyze a small set of disability disclosures in the reflective writing included as part of the 2024 Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process at my institution. I suggest that there is particular value in considering unprompted disclosures of disability in placement data, as such mentions reveal how and whether students perceive disability to be broadly relevant and welcome in writing programs and classrooms (even when it is not asked about). Examining these explicit and implicit mentions of disability in DSP data also urged me to consider how to more intentionally represent, and ask about, disability in writing placement surveys, which I consider in the final section of this essay. In all, this short essay invites more scholarship at the intersection of assessment, placement, and disability.
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