All About Rubrics Book

3. Assessment Rubrics

For education purposes, a rubric is considered to be a scoring guide or a set of criteria for grading. It's an attempt to communicate expectations of quality around a task. So, a good rubric should serve both instructor (the marker) and student (the learner).  

Let's consider each perspective...

Instructor

Generally speaking, instructors have a good idea about quality from first glance. They can listen to an oral presentation, skim over an essay, or examine a carpentry join and pretty quickly know whether it is superior, satisfactory, or not-up-to-standard. They might even be able to assign it an overall grade without picking it apart too much. However, bias always creeps in. Sources of instructor bias include:

• Fatigue, when marking a large number of performances.
• Score creep - gradually marking more generously or harder.
• Getting stuck in the weeds and losing sight of the main objectives of task.
• Fading confidence in your own ability to judge (i.e. second-guessing).
• Rooting for a student you like, or looking with less kind eyes on the work of those students you don't. 

How many of these have you experienced?

Students

Your high achieving students (those who know how to "play the game of school") will be looking for rubrics. They tend to use them as a checklist of what to do to get the top score. But many (if not most, in my experience) do not pay much attention to the rubric. How often do your students ask you, "What are you looking for?" even after you've given them the assignment instructions and rubric? Or, "What could I have done better" after you've returned a completed rubric?

This tells me that students really need two things:

• examples of quality
• feedback

Let's look at how we can build and use rubrics to meet both the needs of instructors and students.