As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it "can become a means for proactive change" (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our "equal opportunity" writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and "revision" the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the "quid pro quo" between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.