A study was conducted at Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) to analyze the college's assessment of students' reading and writing skills, investigate the relationship between assessment scores and grades in specific content courses, establish the relationship between developmental course completion and content course grades, and measure skill improvement. Since January 1984, 1,960 PVCC students were assessed using the Northern Virginia English Qualifying Exam for writing and the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. An examination of their test results and course grades revealed the following: (1) 879 students scored below college-level on the English Qualifying Exam, but only 297 scored below a 10th grade reading level, which placed approximately 15% of the students in developmental reading and 45% in developmental writing; (2) a slight negative relationship was discovered between students' assessment scores and their grades in psychology, history, accounting, or economics; (3) within a sample of 25 students scoring below the cutoff on the writing exam and below the 10th grade reading level, successful completion of developmental courses was related to higher grades and persistence rates; and (4) students who completed the developmental writing course evidenced skill improvements on the English Qualifying Exam post-test. (EJV)