 Student reaction to their first objective test was my first impetus to perhaps rethink the entire evaluation program that I designed for a large lecture class. I had lines of students after the first exam swearing that they had studied so hard and they knew so much more than was asked on that test. Obviously I had just asked the wrong questions. In the first syllabus that I designed for 201 I had been told by other teachers of large lecture classes that the only way to survive that was to give Scantron exams and compute the grades rather straightforwardly from those Scantron exams because there are simply too many students to get to know them personally, to give an essay exam would mean that you would spend the entire quarter grading those essay exams and so I accepted that experienced wisdom and did it that way. A concurrent experience with teaching my first fall quarter GUR was to be teaching a 300 level major course in which I expected the students would have the necessary writing skills to write what I considered to be a short research paper and I found out as the quarter progressed that this assignment was causing them great distress because they had never written a paper of that length before. They had not had explicit instruction on how to write such a paper and when I tried to follow that through find out why not? How can you be a junior in college and not have those skills? They explained they had been in GURs for the last two years, large lecture classes for the most part but not very often in classes that were of the size that would require much writing again because of the logistics of evaluation of that much writing and so they were hitting it for the first time and the assignment that I had given them was exceeding their skill level and I wanted to start instilling skills much earlier so that they would be confident at juniors and be working with content rather than skills at that level. Then the third motivation was attending the teaching and learning academy. The TLA discussions involve instructors, faculty, students, staff, administrators and even on occasion interested community partners in education. Listening to student frustration both with evaluation and with their own perceived lack of skills and how to acquire them and feeling that they were a number rather than a developing scholar that nobody knew their name were some of the additional reasons that I thought it was time to introduce a more personalized way of being evaluated and learning. The fourth was I found that their support on this campus for doing that. The writing center gave a number of workshops, brought in speakers, sessions on best practices so I learned from instructors who were already introducing writing into their classes and became convinced that it wasn't an impossible thing to do.