Weimer (2016) reminds us of the advantages of using rubrics for students: Rubrics clarify assignment details for students. They provide an operational answer to the frequently asked student question, “What do you want in this assignment?” They make grading more transparent and can be used to help students develop those all-important self-assessment skills. For teachers, rubrics expedite grading and can make it a more objective process.
She also points out the advantages rubrics offer instructors: The power to clarify thinking about the knowledge and skills an instructor wants to assess. Faculty can do a great deal of assessment, across multiple courses, semester after semester. It’s easy for the response to student work to become habitual, automatic, and not always thoughtful. After grading so many hundreds of essays and short answers, the good, the bad, and the ugly are easy to pick out.
Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation states: Grading consistency is difficult to maintain over time because of fatigue, shifting standards based on prior experience, or intrusion of other criteria. Furthermore, rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty and by allowing instructors to refer to the rubric description associated with a score rather than having to write long comments. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in large courses that have multiple graders (other instructors, teaching assistants, etc.) because they can help ensure consistency across graders and reduce the systematic bias that can be introduced between graders.
While the Purdue Owl recommends the following for technical writing in engineering, many of these tips are universal regardless of assignment type:
Give students the rubric you will use before they turn in their writing assignments. This helps students understand the basis on which their writing will be scored, and it makes both you and your students accountable to the same set of standards.
If students are completing their writing assignments in class, make the rubric available to them as they’re writing by putting it up on the projector screen in a Word document or PowerPoint slide.
Consider creating the rubric with your students, because it provides them with a chance to reflect on the assignment and promotes their metacognitive awareness of the rhetorical writing tasks they must perform. Furthermore, if students dictate the parameters of the rubric, they are being held accountable to standards that they set for themselves rather than by an instructor or TA. To get students to think about important criteria for a particular assignment, instructors or TAs might try the following strategies:
Open a class discussion by asking students why they think the assignment is important.
Ask students to write a response where they describe what effective and ineffective examples of the assignment would look like. Then, have them share their examples and generate criteria based on the characteristics that they describe.
Brainstorm evaluative criteria as a class. Ask students to volunteer what they consider important traits or characteristics for this assignment and write their ideas on the board. After all answers have been shared, ask students to rank which traits or characteristics are the most important.
Put students into groups and ask each group to come up with several criteria for evaluating the assignment and rank each one according to their importance. Then, have each group share their criteria and use the most important from each group.
Have a quick discussion with your students to make sure they understand what each category in the rubric means.
Discuss why certain categories in the rubric have higher point values than others. For example, you may discuss why showing conceptual knowledge or having adequate evidence to back up a claim is more important than grammatical correctness.
