Evaluating Student Work with Rubrics

When it comes to assessment, we know that we need direct measures of student learning. Direct measures seem easy when we use exams, but what about papers and other student-produced elements? Faculty need some basis for evaluating work from one student to the next that approaches some level of objectivity. This is where rubrics come into play. The ultimate goals of using rubrics are twofold: objective approach to evaluating student work, and a tool for students.

Rubrics serve as an evaluation tool that provide faculty with a means of assessing student work against standards or metrics. While rubrics do not eliminate the potential influence of subjective bias in the grading process, they do offer standardization in evaluation. As a tool for students, rubrics provide a baseline for providing feedback. Students can see where the faculty member evaluated the work based on the rubric, and have a basis for understanding the grade. But, we should not rely on marking boxes in a rubric for feedback. As I stated, rubrics provided a baseline for providing feedback. Good practice is to provide additional comments for each criterion evaluated through the rubric. If the point of an assignment is to assess student learning, faculty need to continue the learning process through meaningful feedback.

I have seen rubrics that I would nominate for awards, they are so good. What makes a good rubric is clarity. When a rubric is built well, I can look at it without seeing a description of the assignment, and know only from the rubric what is expected for the assignment. I have also seen rubrics that I wish had never been created. Bad rubrics are most often bad due to the lack of what makes good rubrics good: clarity. When a rubric is bad, the language is often vague and unclear.

Writing a (good) rubric for the first time can be challenging. Starting from scratch without a sound example is a daunting task. Fortunately, there are a lot of great resources. To help sort through the mounds of rubric resources that come up in a web search, I have created a Google Drive folder with some resources. In it, you’ll find a document with two sites I find most useful. Also in the folder is an example of a rubric I use, along with an accompanying form to help provide students feedback based on the rubric criteria. If you have other rubric resources you find particularly useful, send them to me, and I’ll include them in the Google Drive folder.