For over one-hundred years, and since the work of Thorndike and Hillegas, writing assessment practices have rested on the value of inter-rater agreement to show reliability – agreement achieved through norming practices. Recent conversations, though, have emphasized a greater use of localized practices and the importance of stakeholders against a background of standardized assessments such as No Child Left Behind and a society that values accountability. Due to very real circumstances, such as student enrollment and a need to ensure a strong and consistent student experience across sections, some writing programs, especially those making use of Graduate Teaching Assistants, may have a desire to use norming techniques and standardized writing assessment designed around local contexts and requirements. While several studies have been conducted on the effects of standardized assessment on primary and secondary education, none have done so in the post-secondary composition classroom. Thus, via qualitative methods, the purpose of this ethnographic study is to investigate the effects of standardized writing assessment practices on a single, novice instructor, even though those practices are locally designed and governed. Using feminist principles and activity theory, and through interviews with an instructor and program administration, several classroom observations, and an analysis of classroom genres, a deep map is created. This map provides a richer understanding of the relationship between the program rubric, end-of-term portfolio exchange, and the classroom decisions of this instructor. From this contextualized study, important additions to discussions surrounding the effects of standardized writing assessment practices on instructors, teaching and learning to the test, and just how localized, local assessment practices should be are made for participants, the program, writing assessment scholars, and anyone involved in decisions of program-level writing assessment.