This study was conducted to determine whether the writing skills, as measured by the University Writing Requirement (UWR), of Kentucky high school graduates who had participated in Kentucky's Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) writing portfolios had improved in comparison with their peers in the past who had not done the writing portfolios. The UWR is one of Eastern Kentucky University's standards for graduation. The objectives were to compare the UWR scores of pre- and post-Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) students and to determine the significance of the difference. Researchers randomly selected 50 UWR essays written by Kentucky high school graduates in response to a prompt, Spectator Sport, given in fall 1989 (pre-KERA). The same number of essays responding to the same prompt given in summer 1997 (post-KERA) were also selected. A copy was made of each of the 100 essays to mask the effects of aging and to make the physical appearance of all the essays similar. Four UWR trained and experienced readers were asked to score the essays, and each essay was scored by two readers. The means of the essays in pre-KERA and post-KERA groups were computed and subjected to t-tests to determine the significance of the difference. No significant difference was found at any level between the means of the two groups. (SLD)