Process-based composition pedagogy has ignored the question of "doneness": the criteria used to decide when a piece of writing is complete. This article uses survey results from first- and second-year composition courses to challenge common beliefs about how students determine when writing assignments are sufficiently completed. We find that novice writers often relied on personal affective judgments, while advanced but still developing writers turned more to external markers. Students largely neglected process-oriented revision tasks, and relied too heavily on lower-order strategies like proofreading. Students in both groups tended to rely on a single strategy for determining doneness, rather than incorporating personal, institutional, and process-based strategies in combination. Little awareness of the rhetorical exigencies of different writing situations was demonstrated. We emphasize the need for reiterating fundamental writing tasks in secondary or advanced writing courses, and we suggest strategies for incorporating a consideration of doneness into the composition classroom.