The authors report on research they conducted in which Japanese college studentsshared responsibility for self-assessing their own written work on two high stakestests. In this experiment, students served as a second raters on tests that arenormally blind rated by two instructors. After engaging in an orientation andnorming session identical to that which rating instructors do, students assessed theirown tests using the same rubric that instructors use. Following the institutionalpolicy requiring that blind raters must be within two points in their assessment of apiece of writing, students were also required to be within the same range of the firstrating instructor in order to satisfy inter-rater reliability, otherwise the test, as is thestandard procedure, went to a third rater (in this case, another instructor). While theresults showed that students' tended to rate themselves too high, the level ofdiscrepancy between teacher and student ratings was not so extreme as to precludeexploring self-assessment further. In addition, the students generally perceived self-assessment as a positive experience. It is hoped that the lessons learned through thispilot study can lead to the successful establishment of self-assessment for futurewriting tests.