In recent years, TOPIC-the Texas Tech Online Print-Integrated Curriculum, a site that many C&W participants have heard about in the past two years, has become the centerpiece of the Texas Tech Composition Program. Its implementation was phased in over a two-year period, and most graduate instructors now use a wide variety of TOPIC's available features, including the site's ability to facilitate and store online peer critiques, draft submissions, personal journals, and email. The instructor has license to pick and choose from among these functions in order to best support what he or she deems valuable in composition instruction. On the other hand, all instructors are asked to calculate students' grades on TOPIC, a feature that uses assignment "weights" to quickly and efficiently calculate grades "on the fly" throughout the semester. Provided the teacher keeps up with his/her grading, students have instant access to their own up-to-date grades, in addition to their general standing in the class as a whole. Under these circumstances, students are better able to assess their own progress and get a sense of how their work compares with others in their classroom community.

I consider this powerful student/teacher capability from a humanist perspective. Clearly, the issue of information access has a place in the discourse of humanism, especially when considering the unethical ways in which information is often withheld from students and others in order to sustain oft-unsavory power relations. Yet what are the practical, ethical, political, and rhetorical implications of making up-to-date grades constantly available? What new challenges does this present to teachers working and assessing in such an online environment? I argue that the advantages of the "open system" can be usefully interrogated and that we must think carefully about how the online environment and assessment theory and practice bear upon one another as the Internet becomes a space for grade publication.