Rubrics and assessment

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly describes the instructor’s performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric identifies:

Criteria

the aspects of performance (e.g., argument, evidence, clarity) that will be assessed

Descriptors

the characteristics associated with each dimension (e.g., argument is demonstrable and original, evidence is diverse and compelling)

Performance levels

a rating scale that identifies students’ level of mastery within each criterion

Rubrics can be used to provide feedback to students on diverse types of assignments, from papers, projects, and oral presentations to artistic performances and group projects.

A carefully designed rubric can offer a number of benefits to instructors. Rubrics help instructors to

• reduce the time spent grading by allowing instructors to refer to a substantive description without writing long comments
• help instructors more clearly identify strengths and weaknesses across an entire class and adjust their instruction appropriately
• help to ensure consistency across time and across graders
• reduce the uncertainty that can accompany grading
• discourage complaints about grades

An effective rubric can also offer several important benefits to students. Rubrics help students to:

• understand instructors’ expectations and standards
• use instructor feedback to improve their performance
• monitor and assess their progress as they work towards clearly indicated goals
• recognize their strengths and weaknesses and direct their efforts accordingly

For more examples of rubrics, please visit the Eberly Center website Links to an external site., where this content was shamelessly stolen from.

What is being evaluated and why? Qualities of a product? Adherence to a process?

What is the relationship between your criteria and the course outcomes being measured?

Are you using the rubric to cultivate or reinforce academic behaviors?

What does success look like?

Is there more than one way to succeed?

What is the minimum score a student should receive for merely attempting the assignment?

What is communicated to the student who makes an unsuccessful attempt?

Will there be a chance to revise? How will the rubric help students improve their performance?

There are many great examples Links to an external site. of rubrics to use as models or steal wholesale, but many people have a fairly limited idea of what rubrics are or how they can be used. They tend to be holistic, linear, descriptive, and often deficit-oriented, which is probably why there has been something of a backlash against them in recent years. 

Especially when creating a rubric for an authentic, open-ended, student-driven assessment, your rubric may have to be broader and more flexible, so here are some alternative strategies to consider when constructing a rubric:

Multiple Pathways

Make the cumulative points from the rubric worth more than the value of the assignment. You don't have to award extra credit if the student scores over 100% on the rubric, but this provides multiple ways that the student can earn an A. Students can use skills they excel in to compensate for skills they struggle with and allow the instructor to reward behaviors that don't appear in all responses to an assignment but whose absence isn't typically penalized, like a clear voice in a writing assignment or providing contextual research in a lab report.

Reward Effort

Rubrics can award points for effort and behavior rather than (or alongside) performance. Rubrics that grade assignments holistically can be extremely punishing for students struggling with several concepts, resulting in a rating of "below expectations" in half of the categories. Recognizing the effort they put in by awarding points for fulfilling basic assignment requirements and guidelines can be a way to encourage students even if they haven't mastered some of the skills These effort criteria can also be a useful reminder to instructors of what their struggling students are managing to accomplish.

Separate grading from Feedback and Assessment

It can sometimes be problematic to use the same instrument to both provide feedback and award points for a grade because it can push instructors to be too harsh or too lenient. Especially for formative assessments, it can be useful to have two sets of criteria: criteria that awards points for effort and merely descriptive categories for providing feedback. If you are using rubrics to collect performance data on course outcomes, this is built into the rubric-building process because you can choose not to use the outcome to award points when you import it into your rubric. You can also choose not use the rubrics to display or reward points at all. (It's the second of five options at the bottom of the rubric when you are creating or editing it).

Avoid deficit language

Try to use language that emphasizes presence and capacity rather than absence or deficit. Even category labels like "meets expectations" and "below expectations" can be problematic. If you award points in any criteria, try to make sure the description of that rank describes what the points were awarded for. If students were "expected" to answer 3 questions according to the assignment guidelines and they only answered 1, the description might read "answered 1 out of 5 questions," and the rank level might be labeled "beginning" or even "foot in the door."

Example

Below is a rubric for an annotated bibliography that combines three of these techniques:

Rewarding effort

Even though the quality of work is rewarded on specific criteria, like the quality of sources, the source evaluation, and the citation formatting, the points are awarded per entry and cumulatively rather than holistically, so a student's base and maximum grade is dependent primarily on the amount of effort they put into the assignment.

Multiple pathways

The assignment is also worth 100 points, but the rubric goes up to 125, so students can make a few formatting errors and still get full credit or collect and evaluate more sources to make sure they get full credit.

Non-graded criteria

Finally, the last three criteria are course outcomes that don’t contribute to the final assignment grade but keep track of student performance and keep it separate from the assignment grade.

Here are some criteria you can use to evaluate whether your rubrics are effective (or where they may be failing):

Accuracy

Does your rubric generate a grade that accurately reflects the student's performance? Do students who fail to "meet expectations" in several categories earn a failing grade? Does the final score pass the "gut check" test or does it surprise you by awarding grades that seem too high or too low?

Transparency

Does your rubric effectively communicate your grading process? Could a student use it to award a grade to their own assignment that is similar to what you would come up with?

Descriptive

Do the criteria or categories describe recognizable student behavior or performance levels? Are the ranks differentiated enough so that the product can easily be located within them. Does the description help students recognize things in their work that they might otherwise miss? Does it provide useful feedback?

Constructive

Does the rubric provide actionable feedback? Does it help guide student behavior on future assignments?

How do I manage rubrics in a course? Links to an external site.

How do I add a rubric in a course? Links to an external site.

How do I add a rubric to an assignment? Links to an external site.

How do I add a rubric to a graded discussion? Links to an external site.

How do I add a rubric to a quiz? Links to an external site.

For more more information on integrating outcomes into rubrics to track student progress, visit this training page from Emory Links to an external site.. 

To add an outcome to a rubric, the outcome must already exist for your course. You can align outcomes that you have imported from the account level or create your own course outcomes. See the page on creating and importing outcomes.
Please keep in mind that rubrics cannot be edited once they have been added to more than one assignment in a course.

How do I align an outcome with a rubric in a course? Links to an external site.

Instead of selecting "+ Criterion" when adding a line to your rubric, you will select "Find Outcome." You will not have the option of editing this outcome once it has been inserted into a rubric. The only choice you have is whether or not to use the criterion (outcome) for grading. I most cases, you won't, so you will want to deselect that default option.

In most cases, you will place the outcomes at the end of the rubric, as in the example above. However, in a capstone project that measures student performance on multiple course outcomes, you might choose to distribute the outcomes throughout the rubric so they are closest to the criteria that are most aligned with them. This will take some planning because you are unable to rearrange the position of criteria or outcomes in a rubric once they have been placed.

Traditional and holistic

This ENGL 101 Writing Rubric is a more traditional rubric in that it is meant to be applied holistically, and each category measures quality of work rather than effort, but please note that the language emphasizes presence and capability rather than absence or deficit. It also doesn’t award points for particular ranks but is meant to be a feedback device first and a device for determining a grade second.

Multiple pathways

This participation rubric from First Year Experience covers multiple weekly activities collectively worth 15 participation points per module, but students can make up for missing some activities by doing more work on others.

Rewarding behaviors

This generic literature discussion forum rubric adds up to 125 points, but a typical discussion forum is only worth 50 points. Students aren’t expected to max out these categories every week, and some discussions will lend themselves to certain categories more than others, so students can earn full credit for the week even if they fail to engage in some of these activities at all. But please note that, for the most part, the maximum number of points they can receive is determined by the number of paragraphs they write, which get more valuable if they demonstrate specific skills and behaviors that I am trying to reinforce. However, they can't get full credit just for writing a long post unrelated to the text because each category also has a maximum.

• 2 points for each substantial paragraph about the text provided at least one of them was posted before the suggested deadline in each forum. (Up to 14 points)
• 1 point for each full paragraph that is grammatically correct, focused, coherent, and avoids excessive padding. (Up to 7 points)
• 2 points for each full paragraph that sticks closely to the text and contributes materially to the discussion without straying off topic. (Up to 10 points)
• 2 points for each of those paragraphs that are a thoughtful, appropriate response to another student's post. (Up to 10 points)
• 3 points for each of those paragraphs that propose an interpretation of some part of the text that is supported by evidence from the text. (Up to 12 points)
• 3 points for each of those paragraphs that corrects another student's interpretation or analysis using evidence from the text. (Up to 12 points)
• 2 points for each of those paragraphs that correctly uses literary concepts or terms in the analysis of a text (partial credit for a worthy attempt). An additional point if those concepts or terms are tailored to the specific genre or medium being discussed. (Up to 10 points)
• 2 points for each of those paragraphs that responds to, or incorporates, ideas discussed in synchronous sessions or mini-lecture announcements. (Up to 10 points)
• For each paragraph that synthesizes (combines) ideas from several other posts to develop a more complex interpretation of the text. (Up to 10 points)
• Up to 10 points if the student thoughtfully compares the ideology of the text to the student's own world view.
• Up to 10 points if the student discusses the difference between literature, entertainment, and propaganda.

Tyler Rablin and Jeffery Frieden take many of these concepts to the next level with HyperRubrics (rubrics with hyperlinks). Tyler Rablin provides a quick introduction to the concept here: 

There a few key components to this type of rubric:

• Not just capacity language but a focus on concrete skills or behaviors.
• Categories emphasize path towards mastery by implying future skill levels.
• Provides both entry point and a path forward by describing the next step in the mastery of the skill being assessed.
• Provides links to key resources within the rubric.
• Can be used for student self-assessment.

For a more detailed explanation, please see their post on Jennifer Gonzalez's Cult of Pedagogy blog Links to an external site..

Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). Creating and using rubrics . Eberly Center. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/assesslearning/rubrics.html Links to an external site..

Emory University. (n.d.). Outcomes (and rubrics) . Faculty Online Training. https://canvas.emory.edu/courses/11739/pages/outcomes-and-rubrics Links to an external site.. 

Gonzalez, J. (2021, August 23). Introducing the HyperRubric: A tool that takes learning to the next level . Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/hyperrubric/. Links to an external site.

Hurley, J. (2018, February 13). Why I threw away my rubrics . Teaching with Trust. https://professorhurley.com/2018/02/13/why-i-threw-away-my-rubrics/ Links to an external site..

Hurley, J. (2020, August 12). Rubrics and the dehumanization of education . Medium. https://profhurley.medium.com/rubrics-and-the-dehumanization-of-education-19f1907860e6 Links to an external site..

Kohn, A. (2016, June 21). The trouble with rubrics . Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/ Links to an external site..

Mueller, J. (2018). Rubrics . Authentic Assessment Toolbox. http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/rubrics.htm Links to an external site..

Rablin, T. (2021). HyperRubrics: Rubrics that focus on the future . YouTube . https://youtu.be/_h3yQte68EY.

Schrock, K. (2021, March 4). Assessment and rubrics . Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything. https://www.schrockguide.net/assessment-and-rubrics.html Links to an external site..