Why
While grading most assessments and assignments can be fairly simple, more complex student work such as essays and creative work may require more instructor time and thought for grading. For these and many other student works, you may find a rubric helpful.
Developing a rubric can help you identify what is important about the assignment. Don’t care about punctuation? Don’t include it on the rubric. DO care? Include it and indicate just how important it is and why. Care about how well the group members worked together? Include that and indicate how important it is and why. (Care about formal sentence structure and don’t like imperative sentences? Include this and indicate just how important it is and why.) Many rubrics do not include the ‘why this is important,’ but adding it to your rubric or talking about it during a class session can help students both understand and apply appropriate standards.
Sharing the rubric with students as a part of the assignment description will help them understand in advance what you are looking for.
Using the rubric as your grading/evaluation tool and providing the marked rubric back to the student can help the student and also provide talking points for one-on-one meetings.
What
A rubric provides scales describing what is expected for each level of grade and/or points. For example, here is a part of the AACU Teamwork VALUES Rubric (from Rhodes, 2010, https://secure.aacu.org//imis/ItemDetail?iProductCode=E-VRTEAMWORK):
| Condition | Level of performance | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capstone | Milestones | Benchmark | ||
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | |
| Contributes to Team Meetings | Helps the team move forward by articulating the merits of alternative ideas or proposals. | Offers alternative solutions or courses of action that build on the ideas of others. | Offers new suggestions to advance the work of the group. | Shares ideas but does not advance the work of the group. |
| Facilitates the Contributions of Team Members | Engages team members in ways that facilitate their contributions to meetings by both constructively building upon or synthesizing the contributions of others as well as noticing when someone is not participating and inviting them to engage. | Engages team members in ways that facilitate their contributions to meetings by constructively building upon or synthesizing the contributions of others. | Engages team members in ways that facilitate their contributions to meetings by restating the views of other team members and/or asking questions for clarification. | Engages team members by taking turns and listening to others without interrupting. |
For each aspect that you want to measure, you create an additional row. To grade a student’s work, you can then highlight the appropriate column for each row.
There are several types of rubrics, but basically you can have a series of well-defined criterion (usually referred to as an Analytic Rubric) or a single scale (Holistic Rubric). Each type has advantages and disadvantages such as the time required to create the rubric compared to how much time it takes to determine the grade and provide well-defined feedback (Building on Course Readings | Assignment Design | Teaching Guides, n.d.; Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates – Teaching Resources, n.d.).
How: Collections of Free Rubrics
16 AAC&U VALUES Rubrics available from Rhodes, T. (2010). Assessing outcomes and improving achievement: Tips and tools for using rubrics. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/oral-communication
- Civic Engagement – Local and Global
- Creative Thinking
- Critical Thinking
- Ethical Reasoning
- Foundations and Skills for Lifelong Learning
- Global Learning
- Information Literacy
- Inquiry and Analysis
- Integrative and Applied Learning
- Intercultural Knowledge and Competence
- Oral Communication
- Problem Solving
- Quantitative Literacy
- Reading
- Teamwork
- Written Communications
Other rubrics are available at these sites:
40 rubric examples: Rubric Examples. (n.d.). CTRE Faculty Development | Chicago State University. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.csu.edu/CTRE/pdf/rubricexamples-all.pdf
Over 100,000 university-level rubrics which can be filtered by grade level, subject, and type: Rubric Gallery: List of public rubrics. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.rcampus.com/rubricshellc.cfm?mode=gallery&sms=publicrub
Over 50 rubrics listed by program: Rubric Examples. (n.d.). University of Illinois Springfield. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.uis.edu/assessment/rubric-examples
How: List of Free Rubric Creation Sites (some with searchable saved rubrics)
Epperson, A. (2016, September 28). Rubric Maker—Where to Create Free Rubrics Online. PBIS Rewards. https://www.pbisrewards.com/blog/free-online-rubric-maker/
How: Guidelines on writing rubrics
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (n.d.). Rubric Creation and Use. Indiana University Bloomington. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/rubric-creation-use/index.html
Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates – Teaching Resources. (n.d.). NC State Teaching Resources. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://teaching-resources.delta.ncsu.edu/rubric_best-practices-examples-templates/
Schrock, K. (n.d.). Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://www.schrockguide.net/
Conclusion: Why I wrote this
I have an Ed.D., MA, and BA all in education. I don’t recall any course that discussed rubrics, and I regret not knowing sooner. I think my students and I would have performed better if I had used them in the early courses I taught. “It may not seem very important, I know, but it is, and that’s why I’m bothering telling you so” (Geisel, 1962).
References
Building on Course Readings | Assignment Design | Teaching Guides. (n.d.). Teaching Commons, DePaul University. Retrieved November 17, 2020, from https://resources.depaul.edu/teaching-commons/teaching-guides/assignment-design/Pages/reading.aspx
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (n.d.). Rubric Creation and Use. Indiana University Bloomington. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/rubric-creation-use/index.html
Epperson, A. (2016, September 28). Rubric Maker—Where to Create Free Rubrics Online. PBIS Rewards. https://www.pbisrewards.com/blog/free-online-rubric-maker/
Geisel, T. S. (1962). Dr Seuss’s Sleep Book (Anniversary edition). Random House Books for Young Readers.
Rhodes, T. (2010). Assessing outcomes and improving achievement: Tips and tools for using rubrics. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/initiatives/value.
Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates – Teaching Resources. (n.d.). NC State Teaching Resources. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://teaching-resources.delta.ncsu.edu/rubric_best-practices-examples-templates/
Rubric Examples. (n.d.). CTRE Faculty Development | Chicago State University. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.csu.edu/CTRE/pdf/rubricexamples-all.pdf
Rubric Examples. (n.d.). University of Illinois Springfield. Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.uis.edu/assessment/rubric-examples
Rubric Gallery: List of public rubrics. (n.d.). Retrieved June 19, 2023, from https://www.rcampus.com/rubricshellc.cfm?mode=gallery&sms=publicrub Schrock, K. (n.d.). Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything. Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://www.schrockguide.net/