Develop rubrics
Learn about rubrics and how they can help clarify your expectations around assessments and streamline the grading process while supporting students’ learning.
What are rubrics and why use them?
Your assessment criteria, standards and grading scale can be combined into a rubric, also known as an evaluation tool or scoring guide, to help you assess student work.
Rubrics are helpful for clarifying the expectations for learning, minimizing follow-up questions to assignment instructions, curtailing challenges to grades, diminishing student anxiety overall, and decreasing grading time for instructors (Stevens et al., 2012; Suskie, 2018). When aligned with your course’s learning outcomes, rubrics help keep grading focused on the concepts, knowledge, learning, and/or skills that you will evaluate.
Keep students on track by being transparent
Especially when made available in advance, the rubric can alert students to key aspects of the assignment and allow them to focus on the learning elements. A rubric also helps students understand how grades are assigned.
Save time and provide students with timely feedback
Marking with a rubric makes for quicker grading. A quick turnaround gives students more time to incorporate feedback into subsequent work. Ticking off elements of the rubric is a form of feedback so working this way can also free up time to add more directed or personalized comments. (Find our tips on practices that can help streamline the process of giving feedback while also providing students with targeted information about their learning).
Clearly identify for students the areas they need to work on
When shared with assignment instructions, the rubric supports self-assessment of students’ own work; when used to give feedback, students learn where to focus their attention for improvement.
Facilitate grading with multiple markers
Having a rubric supports the validity of an assessment by making grading consistent and more equitable when more than one person is grading students’ work.
Components of a rubric
A rubric can take on many formats, but there are some common characteristics:
Guiding question
What knowledge, skill or value do I plan to assess in this assignment?
Definition
The assessment criteria describe the knowledge, skills, or values that are being assessed. Ideally, these should be aligned with the course learning outcomes. The criteria description should be distinct, clear, and meaningful. For example, if you ask students to investigate a topic, you can assess their integration of supporting research materials.
Tip
Selecting and writing your assessment criteria is the first step in building a rubric.
Guiding question
What should my students be able to accomplish and at what standard on this assignment?
Definition
Performance descriptors describe the standard the learner is expected to meet, as well as what exceeds or is below the standard. The names of these descriptors can vary (e.g., excellent, good, acceptable, deficient; sophisticated, competent, not yet competent) and the descriptions should include observable characteristics of the expected level of performance. Work to ensure that the descriptors express clear differences between the levels so that students can differentiate between them, for example recognizing the difference between what is considered “excellent” versus “good.”
Tip
Aim to include 3–5 levels of performance on your rubric (you can use the AAC Rubric Wordsmith to help you find words that describe various levels of quality).
Draft the description of the highest level of performance first and then develop the other levels accordingly.
Guiding questions
How do the performance levels correspond to a grade? Are all the criteria worth the same amount?
Explanation
In some cases, you may want to add points, percentages or letter grades to the levels of performance. You may also choose to assign a higher weighting to some of the assessment criteria.
Tip
If your department has a grading scale, you might consider having your rubric reflect that scale.
Example
Below is an example (adapted for web) from a rubric designed by Prof. Susan Ambrose, Carnegie Mellon University, for a group presentation in a history course.
Each criterion is defined along with its corresponding point value for the level of achievement.
Criterion 1: Quality (e.g. use of varied sources, evaluated and validated sources, accurate information)
| Sophisticated | Competent | Not Yet Competent |
|---|---|---|
| 3 points | 2 points | 1 point |
|
|
|
Criterion 2: Broad spectrum of information (e.g. on (1) political, (2) economic, (3) social, (4) historical and (5) geographical dimensions)
| Sophisticated | Competent | Not Yet Competent |
|---|---|---|
| 3 points | 2 points | 1 point |
| Includes all five dimensions | Includes four of the five dimensions | Includes three or fewer dimensions |
Criterion 3: Substantive use of information (e.g. explanations on political, economic, social, historical and geographical dimensions are complete and helpful; made connections, inferences, drew conclusions, noted convergence and divergence among resources)
| Sophisticated | Competent | Not Yet Competent |
|---|---|---|
| 3 points | 2 points | 1 point |
|
|
|
Criterion 4: Effective slides (e.g. coherent, logical progression, well organized, include main points not details, “tell a story”)
| Sophisticated | Competent | Not Yet Competent |
|---|---|---|
| 3 points | 2 points | 1 point |
| Slides clearly aid the speaker in telling a coherent story | For the most part slides are helpful in telling the story with only a few glaring problems | Slides interfere with the story |
Types of rubrics
There are four main types of rubrics you can develop:
- analytic
- holistic
- single-point
- scoring guide
Each differ in the time it takes to develop and grade, as well as in the amount of supplemental feedback required.
Tips for rubric design and use
Build or integrate your rubrics on Moodle
Moodle allows you to create or import a rubric that you can use to grade directly in the “Assignments” option.
Use exemplars in tandem with rubrics
Exemplars are carefully chosen samples of student work that can be used to illustrate quality and clarify your expectations (Carless & Chan, 2017). They can potentially also help students better understand rubrics and feedback. For example, you can use exemplars to illustrate to students the fulfillment of assessment criteria or to highlight shortfalls (Smyth et al, 2020).
Use GenAI to develop your rubrics
You can create a rubric using GenAI based on the specifics of your assessment and learning outcomes. Keep in mind that both GenAI and rubrics require thoughtful input and refining to be effective. Read the following article for steps to follow and example prompts.
Try out and tweak your rubric
Rubrics take time upfront to develop and then make for more streamlined grading. However, you won’t know if your rubric works until you’ve tried it with your students. Check your rubric with your students and/or TAs to ensure the rubric is clear and be prepared to make changes.
Examples of rubrics
Explore a series of in-house and curated examples of rubrics for different assignment types, disciplines and levels of study.
Rubrics for assessing student participation (in class and online)
Collections of sample rubrics for different types of assignments and learning outcomes
References
Carless, D., & Chan, K. K. H. (2017). Managing dialogic use of exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(6), 930–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1211246
Smyth, P., To, J., & Carless, D. (2020). The interplay between exemplars and rubrics. In P. Granger & K. Weir (Eds.), Facilitating student learning and engagement in higher education through assessment rubrics (pp. 57–67). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Stevens, D., Levi, A., & Walvoord, B. (2012). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning (2nd ed.). Stylus Publishing.
Suskie, L. (2018). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.