Many colleges face the challenge of recruiting examinees for institutional assessment programs. Unfortunately, students recognize these programs as low-stakes, and therefore may not have high performance motivation. This study examined the interrelationships between students' preferred incentives for taking the test, their performance motivation, and their observed performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Results reveal that freshmen stated a preference for cash and prizes over recognition and feedback as incentives. However, preferred incentives bore no practically significant relationship with test performance. For individual students, motivation was a significant predictor of CLA scores even after controlling for entering academic ability, but this effect was not apparent when schools were the units of analysis. Thus, schools should be attentive to motivation when results are used for individual-level assessment, but motivation is less of a concern when interpreting average scores relative to other schools with students of similar entering academic ability. WinBUGS code is appended. (Contains 4 tables and 7 figures.)