Administrators find the scores valuable and cost-effective as measures of educational outcomes. But because students and teachers need more information to improve the students' writing, teachers seldom use holistic scoring, instead writing comments about specific points on individual papers. Using different methods of assessment for different purposes should work as well in evaluating teaching as it does in evaluating writing.

The failure to distinguish between assessments of overall outcomes and analyses of specific problems has been a sore point from the start in teacher evaluation. The assumption has been that the same information that allows committees and administrators to judge teaching ability will also lead to improved teaching. However, evidence from writing assessment (not to mention the lessons of experience) shows that that is not the case.

Committees do not need or use much of the evidence collected by the questionnaires that students usually fill out to evaluate their teachers. In fact, often a committee needs to know only if a professor is one of the truly exceptional teachers, an average teacher, or one of the really poor teachers who need drastic improvement if they are to stay on the campus. There are so many different ways of being a good teacher, so many ways in which strengths in one area compensate for weaknesses in another, that the detailed questions on the bubble sheets about a professor's attendance, say, or how promptly he or she returns papers wind up as distractions from the holistic assessment that is really called for. A very few questions about the overall quality of the class, or whether students would recommend the teacher to a friend, would produce enough information about students' learning experience in the class.