Rubrics

Overview

A clear, well-designed rubric serves a handful of important purposes. It makes expectations visible to students, which helps align feedback and grading with learning goals and support more consistent feedback within teaching teams. By clarifying what students are being asked to do, it helps them understand how individual assignments build toward larger course goals. While rubrics can help make expectations more transparent, however, they should point students toward a deeper understanding of their progress and areas for improvement, rather than serving as a checklist of minimum requirements for demonstrating mastery or a "paint by numbers" approach to assignments.

Achieving both of those things usually means two related, but distinct, documents: a detailed grading rubric that your teaching team uses to evaluate work consistently, and a broader statement of objectives and expectations that you share with students. They do different jobs, but  collapsing them into one document tends to make both of them less effective.

Advice

When using rubrics in your teaching, the Bok Center recommends:

  1. Create a Grading Rubric for Each Major Assignment: Develop a rubric that defines the key criteria on which students will be evaluated. Criteria should be aligned with the assignment prompt and reflect course learning goals. Where a course has a teaching team, the rubric should be a shared standard the whole team helped shape. If you are a TF, TA, or CA who has been asked to build one, work on it together as a team rather than separately on your own.
  2. Give Students Objectives, Not Your Grading Rubric: Share the assignment's goals, criteria, and expectations with students early and in broad terms, so they understand what they are being asked to accomplish and can read your feedback against it. Keep the more granular grading rubric within the teaching team. Students who are given a detailed scoring document tend to work toward satisfying its individual lines; students who are given clear objectives are more likely to aim at an excellent, coherent piece of work as a whole. Worth keeping in mind when using built-in rubrics with SpeedGrader in Canvas: because students will be able to see the rubric, be sure that you are using a version of the rubric that is aimed at students, rather than the more granular version used by the teaching team. 
  3. Leave the Top of the Rubric Open for Excellence: A grading rubric should differentiate quality. That is, it should distinguish solid, complete work from work that reflects extraordinary distinction. Reserve the top band for that excellence, and make sure it describes more than having satisfied every requirement. With the College's new limit on A grades, that distinction is now more consequential than it has been.
  4. Treat the Rubric as the Foundation for Calibration, Not a Substitute for It: A shared rubric will not by itself produce consistent grading across a teaching team. Pair it with calibration: norming sessions where everyone grades the same sample, example graded assignments from the course head that explain why a piece of work earned an A, A–, or B+, and—where feasible—having TFs/TAs/CAs grade work from outside their own sections. Keep feedback focused on rubric criteria and use shared language/descriptors across the team.
  5. Revisit and Revise Rubrics as Needed: If a rubric changes over the course of an assignment (e.g., because of a shift in what material or which skills the assignment ended up covering), update the objectives you have given students as well, so it stays clear how feedback and grades reflect the assignment's goals.
  6. Use Rubrics to Strengthen Assignment Design: Rubrics can serve as a tool for improving assignment prompts. If a criterion is hard to state in measurable terms, that is often a sign the prompt itself is underspecified. Clarify the language used for grading criteria in both your prompts and rubrics. For example, a verb such as “reflect on” can capture important elements of a student’s experience of an assignment, but is less clear than “analyze” (which would likely require evidence and reasoning) for the purposes of differentiated assessment.