Rubrics help clarify your expectations for students and streamline your grading process. But not all rubrics are created equal. If you’ve ever used a rubric only to find that it didn’t quite meet your needs, you’re not alone. There are several rubrics, each with a different structure and purpose. This article will explore the different types of rubrics and how to choose the right one for your assignment. This will help you create fair, consistent, transparent assessments supporting meaningful student growth. We will also touch upon how to teach essay writing.
Grading software for teachers like EssayGrader can help you achieve your goals with rubrics. This tool helps you quickly find, customize, and implement the right rubric for your assignment to improve the grading process for you and your students.
What are the 3 Elements of a Rubric?
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A rubric is simply a scoring tool that identifies the various criteria relevant to an assignment or learning outcome and then explicitly states the possible levels of achievement along a continuum (poor to excellent or novice to expert). Rubrics can assess almost any student's work:
- Essays
- Final projects
- Oral presentations
- Theatrical performances
They can be used when an assignment is given to communicate expectations to students, when student work is evaluated for fair and efficient grading, and even to assess a program by determining the extent to which students achieve departmental learning outcomes. There are various types of rubrics, but a rubric typically consists of four basic elements:
1. Task Description: What Are You Grading?
The task description generally describes the assignment/coursework designed to assess students' performance in achieving the subject's intended learning outcome.
2. Criteria: The Skills You’re Evaluating
The rows in a rubric list the criteria or aspects of quality used to evaluate students’ performance in the task. These criteria indicate the:
- Skills
- Performance
- Knowledge
Students are required to demonstrate this. Scores/ grades and feedback will be given according to the student’s performance on these criteria. It is advisable not to overcomplicate a rubric by limiting to 4-5 criteria.
3. Level of Performance: How Well Did the Student Do?
The columns in a rubric list the performance levels for each criterion important for students to achieve the intended learning outcomes. Grading labels (short descriptions) will usually be used adopted to describe the level of performance.
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4 Types of Rubrics
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Holistic Rubrics: The Big Picture Approach
A holistic rubric provides students with a general overview of what is expected by describing the characteristics of a paper that would earn an:
- A or be marked “excellent”
- B or “proficient”
- C or “average”
- And so on
Here is an example of a holistic rubric for weekly reading responses in a religion course:
As you can see, a holistic rubric gives students a sense of the criteria for evaluation in this case:
- Understanding of the text
- Engagement with the text
- Ability to explain the significance of the argument
- Organization & ability to answer the prompt, and grammar, mechanics & formatting.
It does not assign any particular value to these criteria and allows more room for variation between papers of one grade.
Benefits of Holistic Rubrics
Holistic rubrics tend to work best for low-stakes writing assignments, and there are several benefits to using a holistic rubric for evaluation:
- They allow for slightly more impressionistic grading, which is useful when papers vary dramatically. (This particular rubric would respond to one of several prompts students could choose from each week).
- They encourage students to think of all the parts of their writing as interconnected, so (for example) students see the organization as connected to the clarity of ideas.
- When used for recurring assignments, they allow students to see a trend in the feedback for their writing.
- They allow for quicker grading since you can highlight or circle specific words or phrases to draw students’ attention to areas of possible improvement.
Drawbacks of Holistic Rubrics
One potential drawback to holistic rubrics is that it can be difficult for students to identify discrete areas for improvement or get specific examples of common missteps.
Analytic Rubrics: The Detailed Approach
An analytic rubric is one that explicitly breaks down an assignment into its constitutive skills and provides students with guidelines for what each performance level looks like for each skill
Here is an example of an analytic rubric for the same assignment:
As you can see, an analytic rubric provides students with much clearer definition of the evaluation criteria. It may or may not assign points to each criteria.
Benefits of Analytic Rubrics
Analytic rubrics tend to work well for complex assignments. There are several benefits to choosing an analytic rubric:
- They allow more specific feedback for students, which can be particularly useful in guiding revision.
- They provide students with more specific guidelines that they can follow when writing their papers.
- They provide students with a sense of your priorities for the assignment.
- They allow for more regular grading.
Drawbacks of Analytic Rubrics
One drawback to analytic rubrics, however, is that they can be difficult to develop for assignments you’re asking students to complete for the first time; if you haven’t yet seen what can go wrong, it can be difficult to identify what poor performance might look like.
Item Structure Marking Rubrics: The Performance Level Breakdown
An item structure rubric describes each level of performance in questions or problems structured into different parts of increasing complexity.
Benefits & Drawbacks
Benefits
- Able to assess the quality of quantitative responses by factoring in the levels of difficulty structured in the problem to solve
- Achieve higher consistency in grading across students and assessors
Drawbacks
- More time-consuming to develop a reliable and valid set of structured problems.
- The score-grade conversion involved can be complicated.
- Reliability might be affected with some outliers being able to answer sophisticated. questions but not the simple questions and vice versa.
Checklists: The Simplest Rubric
Checklists are a distinct type of rubric – where there are only two performance levels possible. Checklists are longer than other rubrics since each aspect of performance you seek in students’ work/performances essentially becomes its criterion. When using a checklist, every decision is binary (yes/no, present/absent, pass/fail, etc.).
Here is a rubric for grading journal entries:
Here is the same rubric converted into a checklist:
Advantages of Checklists
Checklists are generally a simpler and faster way to grade than using a more traditional rubric since you are making discrete decisions for each performance criterion rather than trying to determine where students’ work falls into performance criteria that generally encompass a range of different performance expectations. This also makes the grading clearer to students.
Disadvantages of Checklists
Creating checklists for your assignments might be a slightly onerous process. This is because checklists are longer than a traditional rubric and because identifying each of the discrete elements of “clearly written” or “well organized” might be difficult.
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Guidelines for Developing Rubrics
1. Define the Purpose of the Rubric
Begin by outlining the goals of the rubric. What do you want to achieve by using a rubric? Developing a rubric is a bit exhaustive, especially for the first time.
2. Identify What to Assess
Figure out what you will assess with the rubric. Review the subject description form to identify the intended learning outcomes for the assessment.
3. Select an Appropriate Type of Rubric
Determine whether a holistic, analytic, or item structure rubric suits your needs. Your choice will depend on the assessment type adopted (formative, summative, or mathematically based).
4. Identify the Performance Criteria for Assessing Student Work
List the criteria to be assessed in the task. For example, criteria such as introduction, content, presentation, organization, and time management may be set for a presentation rubric.
5. Identify the Levels of Performance
Appropriate levels of performance have to be identified and adopted to allow assessors to grade and students to identify their level of performance.
6. Describe Each Level of Performance (Grading Descriptors)
Write the grading descriptors for each level of performance with the variance between each level being as equal as possible. To begin with, the descriptors of the highest and lowest levels shall be drafted first. Fill in the descriptors for the levels in between.
7. Pilot the Rubrics
Conducting a trial test or “calibration” process on several samples of work with several assessors using the developed rubric to ensure the rubrics' inter-rater reliability and grading consistency. Fine-tuning of the rubric may be required if the grades resulting from the trial deviate extensively.
8. Periodical Review / Revisions to Rubrics as Necessary
As stated in the University’s rubrics policy, to ensure that the rubrics reflect a suitable level of academic standards, samples marked with the rubrics should be periodically reviewed by:
- Departmental Academic Advisors
- External Examiners
- Overseas Academic Advisors
Optional - Developing Rubrics With Students
Developing rubrics with students would help students to understand the content and purpose of rubrics. Communicating the criteria and standards well ahead of time may assist students in preparing for assessments and greatly reduce future disputes on grades.
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