. The scarring of the past need not continue in the future — a future which will be determined not just by administrators but by brave students who speak out and start making a difference.

The following year, things did end up changing at CSUSB, due in part to the implementation of a new initiative, directed self-placement (DSP), which gave students the opportunity to choose their own English placement.

challenge administrators and faculty to label students accurately: as writers.

So we began writing, hoping to someday publish our work. That was our rebellion against the unfair label.

And then we proposed and presented a session at the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), where the audience response encouraged us to reach farther with our ideas.

However, all the work we read was written by professors and other scholars, not by students who have actually lived with the stigma of being labeled remedial

the remedial label affected my identity formation in that the university’s doubt whether I was a “real” college student weakened my own sense of identity and belonging as a college student

Reading Brandt helped us reflect on our sponsors.

Student portraits when we do get them are too often profiles of failure rather than of people with dynamic mental lives.

I learned that EPT scores like mine result in students being unjustly labeled and prejudged prior to stepping foot inside a classroom of the university

we wanted to do a paper on the topic of “remediation” for our term paper. I thought if I was going to prove that I wasn’t a remedial student, I would need to interview as many students, professors, and administrators that were directly associated with the label as I could, so I did just that

we decided that we needed to look beyond our own experiences to the work of those we were now describing as “other scholars.”

peech celebrating the successful elimination of remedial classes on our campus.

why over half of Cal State students were being labeled remedial, why the majority of the students who are defined as remedial are minorities

this class would be no different from the English class that any incoming college students take, except that our class was stretched over a longer span.

I no longer felt that my essay was controlling me. I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew how to translate it into my paper; I controlled what I wrote.

The term remedial implies that we are not at the college level, but in my “remedial” class all we ever did from the first day was college-level work.

I was shocked when our professor did not hand out a grammar book and start teaching us how to construct sentences or how to properly use a comma. Instead she began by having us read scholarly journals and think critically about them.

She challenged us to prove we were not the label by first using the work to prove it to ourselves.

She never treated us like remedial students. She believed in us and knew from the beginning that we had a lot of potential

I was shocked when I started reading the syllabus. I thought it would have a lot of grammar lessons or basic instructions on how to do an essay, but it didn’t. It had a lot of reading passages and articles by scholars like Michel Foucault, Peter Elbow, James Paul Gee, and many more.

we all had plenty of people to tell us that we were remedial and exactly what that meant: not-good, fake, damaged, unlikely to succeed. We were embarrassed; we felt marginal, inferior, and alienated.

He said, “When you place in remedial it means that you have to take extra English classes in order to be considered a ‘real college student.’” That shocked me because I had worked so hard to get into a university, only to find out that I was not a “real college student” after all.

It’s been three years since I was labeled, and I’ve accomplished so much during that time. However, despite my accomplishments, the label still stings as much as it did at first.

Two weeks later, when I received my EPT results, I was confused

Even “remedial” students can read signs!

Based on our EPT scores, we five FYW students were categorized as remedial.

50–80% of first-year students enrolled on its twenty-three campuses as remedial writers, although sometimes using the label “not yet proficient.” English departments have resisted these categories in various ways, and now most of them have adopted local enactments of what Arizona State University calls “stretch” programs (Glau) in which students do substantive text work that is not, and is not named, remedial.

My literacy is the culmination of my singular life experiences, and my chinks are the acquired, distinctive scars that allow the light from within to shine through.

ommers, who argued that every person is a capable source of information

I compromised my literacy by letting my Chinese go out of practice and evaporate. I can only manage forced, short exchanges in a language I should naturally, competently speak. I have disappointed expectant relatives and visitors by failing to confidently address them in our once shared dialogue. My parents and grandparents are disheartened by my negligent, vaporous Mandarin.

When I’d stopped using bilingual options to convey exclusive nuances with my mother, a monumental portion of my literacy became void

Though that was meant to be a pivotal moment in my life where my literacy first and finally garnered approval and notice from someone with an educative purview, it felt undeserved

The lack of ingenuity was obvious, and excused, by my command of sentence structure, paragraphing, and overall grammar

espite its myriad of hybridizations, my most spoken words retained one message: “ I love you,” or “ mama!”

English is still regarded as a White language

’ve had the distinct impression throughout my life that my literacy was held to a separate, lower standard

My early Chinese socialization continues to frame and disrupt my literacy.”