Beloved of accrediting bodies, rubrics (or scoring guides
as they are sometimes called) are all the rage. For many
instructors, however, rubrics simply sound like more work,
one thing more to do on that endless to-do list. Rubrics do
require some initial investment of time and thought, but in
the long run a well-designed rubric can streamline the
grading process by making clear to both the instructor and
students what constitutes different levels of work. Rubrics
can ensure consistency in grading practices and transparency
in the grading process by serving as a shared understanding
of both the requirements of a project and the expectations
of the instructor.
What exactly is a rubric? Briefly, it is a set of scoring
guidelines for evaluating student work. The rubric indicates
both the criteria that will be used to judge the work and
distinguishes between different levels of performance.
Audience, Purpose and Genre
Stakes and High Stakes Assignments
By identifying the criteria to be used to judge the work,
a good rubric clearly identifies the instructor's
expectations. And by distinguishing between different levels
of performance a good rubric helps students determine how to
meet those expectations. Also, because a rubric is shared
with students early in the process, students become better
judges of the quality of their own work and in peer review
the work of others. The rubric also provides the instructor
with language to give feedback on the quality of work.
Creating a Rubric
Examples of rubrics are easily found online. One key to a
successful rubric, however, is that the rubric be specific
to the assignment. Generalized rubrics for writing, for
example, abound, such as the scoring guides we have
developed for our two first-year writing courses. Click here
to see our rubric for ENGL 101
and ENGL 102. For more
specialized assignments, instructors will want to develop
their own rubrics.
A good rubric takes time and revision
to develop. Here is some basic advice for creating a rubric.
- Because the rubric will need to be refined over
time, pick an assignment that will be used regularly in
a course or regularly in a range of courses.
- Determine what criteria will be used to judge the
work, then distinguish for each criterion what
constitutes different levels of performance. This step
is of course the hard part. Most rubrics are actually
developed in this way:
- Start with examples of the strongest and weakest
performances on an assignment.
- Identify the characteristics or traits shared by
the strong performances and those shared by the weak
performances. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a
list of the criteria that will be used to judge the
- Define different levels of performance. Use the
strong work to define the highest level of
performance and the weak work to define the lowest
level of performance; then extrapolate the middle
levels. The goal here is to identify clearly what distinguishes the
excellent work from the good work from the not-so
- Use the rubric and revise and refine it. Sometimes
the initial rubric doesn't contain all the criteria
necessary. Other times it contains criteria that turns
out to be unimportant. Often the discriminations the
instructor has sought to make between different levels
of quality prove difficult to see in practice.