Designing Rubrics

Rubrics can:

• Let students know what sort of performance to aim for
• Explain what you expect before an assignment is due, rather than after
• Promote consistency across sections and across individuals
• Confirm your priorities for an assignment and explain criteria that are important
• Permit students to evaluate their own work
• Model the language of your course, assignment, and discipline
• Communicate to the entire class about expectations
• Save time by routinizing some forms of evaluation
• And thus make time for more personalized evaluations as needed

Rubrics are both a solution to a problem and a communication strategy. They can help to address many problems, such as:

• Frustration from repeating the same comment on many students' assignments
• Lack of time to comment as much as you'd like to
• Questions from students about your expectations
• Difficulty deciding what grades to assign on given pieces of work

Analytic rubrics describe two or more aspects of performance, with scores divided across aspects. This means that:

• Students get detailed feedback about particular aspects of their work, and relative strengths/weaknesses
• Faculty get structured guidance about their own evaluative process
• The rubric can take significant time to construct and possibly to use (depending on its complexity)

Holistic rubrics describe overall performance, with a single score. This means that:

• Students may not understand why their score is what it is
• Faculty get clear and quick rankings of students
• Quick decisions can be made in situations where feedback isn’t needed or desired

• A rubric depends on an assignment for context. The assignment is your rubric’s foundation, and your directions to students and your rubric should be in harmony.
• A rubric doesn’t repeat the assignment, but a rubric should describe the products your assignment sponsors.
• If you begin with attention to what your deep goals are for students, you’ll approach the rubric in a good frame of mind.
• What do you want students to learn, make, or do?

• What does your assignment involve? What stages, components, or processes does your assignment depend on?
• What challenges might students encounter and what might be unclear to them about your expectations?

• Every task has features that can be described in more/less detail. Selecting features for a rubric means describing the essential features you want students to focus on.
• This may vary depending on their level of experience and the purpose of your course. These dimensions become the leftmost column in a full matrix rubric.
• What are the defining components/features that you will grade?

• Use the fewest scale points that are practical for the decisions you want to make.
• Set up the scale so that it reflects the kinds of decisions you will find easy to make.
• How will you name scale points (1-4, A-F, Excellent-Poor, Novice-Expert…) and how many scale points do you want?

• What does performance at different levels look like?
• Descriptions should make your expectations tangible to students: the value of a rubric lies in its ability to convey what success looks like.
• Be specific (simply asserting that work should be excellent doesn’t tell students what excellence means) and should avoid quantitative measures (which are better suited to a checklist).