Abstract
In their junior year at California State University Sacramento (CSUS), students are asked to engage in a Directed Self Placement (DSP) moment. In that moment, students decide whether they will take a timed writing test or enroll in a Writing In the Disciplines (WID) course. The purpose of this assessment moment is to ensure that students are ready to participate in Upper Division Writing Intensive (UDWI) courses. Students receive a placement score indicating their variable-credit upper-division writing requirements, culminating in a UDWI course. Once students have passed a UDWI course, they have met the Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), and their writing requirements are complete. This research study seeks to examine the effects that the placement moment has on student confidence and student self-efficacy. The theoretical focus of this study is situated within Student Self-Efficacy, Genre Theory, Rhetorical Motivation, Critical Consciousness, and Writing in the Disciplines/Writing Across the Curriculum. Student surveys revealed that students who chose to take the timed writing test and were placed into fewer units of writing coursework had a lower sense of self-efficacy than students who were placed into more units of writing coursework.