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Academic essay rubric

This is a grading rubric an instructor uses to assess students’ work on this type of assignment. It is a sample rubric that needs to be edited to reflect the specifics of a particular assignment. 

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Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

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Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

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Written by Arthur Russell

Just about every discussion of rubrics begins with a caveat: writing rubrics are not a substitute for writing instruction. Rubrics are tools for communicating grading criteria and assessing student progress. Rubrics take a variety of forms, from grids to checklists , and measure a range of writing tasks, from conceptual design to sentence-level considerations.  

As with any assessment tool, a rubric’s effectiveness is entirely dependent upon its design and its deployment in the classroom. Whatever form rubrics take, the criteria for assessment must be legible to all students—if students cannot decipher our rubrics, they are not useful.  

When effectively integrated with writing instruction, rubrics can help instructors clarify their own expectations for written work, isolate specific elements as targets of instruction, and provide meaningful feedback and coaching to students. Well-designed rubrics will draw program learning outcomes, assignment prompts, course instruction and assessment into alignment. 

Starting Points

Course rubrics vs. assignment rubrics.

Instructors may choose to use a standard rubric for evaluating all written work completed in a course. Course rubrics provide instructors and students a shared language for communicating the values and expectations of written work over the course of an entire semester. Best practices suggest that establishing grading criteria with students well in advance helps instructors compose focused, revision-oriented feedback on drafts and final papers and better coach student writers. When deploying course rubrics in writing-intensive courses, consider using them to guide peer review and self-evaluation processes with students. The more often students work with established criteria, the more likely they are to respond to and incorporate feedback in future projects.

At the same time, not every assignment needs to assess every aspect of the writing process every time. Particularly early in the semester, instructors may develop assignment-specific rubrics that target one or two standards. Prioritizing a specific learning objective or writing process in an assignment rubric allows instructors to concentrate time spent on in-class writing instruction and encourages students to develop targeted aspects of their writing processes.  

Developing Evaluation Criteria

• Establish clear categories. What specific learning objectives (i.e. critical and creative thinking, inquiry and analysis) and writing processes (i.e. summary, synthesis, source analysis, argument and response) are most critical to success for each assignment? 
• Establish observable and measurable criteria of success. For example, consider what counts for “clarity” in written work. For a research paper, clarity might attend to purpose: a successful paper will have a well-defined purpose (thesis, takeaway), integrate and explain evidence to support all claims, and pay careful attention to purpose, context, and audience. 
• Adopt student-friendly language. When using academic terminology and discipline-specific concepts, be sure to define and discuss these concepts with students. When in doubt , VALUE rubrics are excellent models of clearly defined learning objective and distinguishing criteria.  

Sticking Points: Writing Rubrics in the Disciplines  

Even the most carefully planned rubrics are not self-evident. The language we have adopted for writing assessment is itself a potential obstacle to student learning and success . What we count for “clarity” or “accuracy” or “insight” in academic writing, for instance, is likely shaped by our disciplinary expectations and measured by the standards of our respective fields. What counts for “good writing” is more subjective than our rubrics may suggest. Similarly, students arrive in our courses with their own understanding and experiences of academic writing that may or may not be reflected in our assignment prompts. 

Defining the terms for success with students in class and in conference will go a long way  toward bridging these gaps. We might even use rubrics as conversation starters, not only as an occasion to communicate our expectations for written work, but also as an opportunity to demystify the rhetorical contexts of discipline-specific writing with students.

Helpful Resources  

For a short introduction to rubric design, the Creating Rubrics guide developed by Louise Pasternack (2014) for the  Center for Teaching  Excellence and Innovation is an excellent resource.  The step-by-step tutorials developed by North Carolina State University and DePaul Teaching Commons are especially useful for instructors preparing rubrics from scratch.  On the use of rubrics for writing instruction and assignments in particular, Heidi Andrade’s “Teaching with Rubrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” provides an instructive overview of the benefits and drawbacks of using rubrics.  For a more in-depth introduction (with sample rubrics), Melzer and Bean’s “Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria” in  Engaging Ideas  is essential reading. 

Cited and Recommended Sources

• Andrade, Heidi Goodrich. “Teaching with Rubrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” College Teaching , vol. 53, no. 1, 2005, pp. 27–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27559213  
• Athon, Amanda. “Designing Rubrics to Foster Students’ Diverse Language Backgrounds.” Journal of Basic Writing , vol. 38, No.1, 2019, pp. 78–103, https://doi.org/10.37514/JBW-J.2019.38.1.05  
• Bennett, Cary. “Assessment Rubrics: Thinking inside the Boxes.” Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences , vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 50–72,  http://www.jstor.org/stable/24718020  
• Broad, Bob. What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing . University Press of Colorado, 2003. https://doi-org.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/10.2307/j.ctt46nxvm  
• Melzer, Dan, and John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom . 3rd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2021 (esp. pp. 253-277), https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=6632622  
• Pasternack, Louise. “Creating Rubrics,” The Innovative Instructor Blog , Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, Johns Hopkins University, 21 Nov. 2014.  
• Reynders, G., et al. “Rubrics to assess critical thinking and information processing in undergraduate STEM courses.” International Journal of STEM Education vol. 7, no. 9, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-00208-5  
• Turley, Eric D., and Chris W. Gallagher. “On the ‘Uses’ of Rubrics: Reframing the Great Rubric Debate.” The English Journal , vol. 97, no. 4, 2008, pp. 87–92, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30047253  
• Wiggins, Grant. “The Constant Danger of Sacrificing Validity to Reliability: Making Writing Assessment Serve Writers.” Assessing Writing , vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, pp. 129-139, https://doi.org/10.1016/1075-2935(94)90008-6  

Essay Rubric

About this printout

This rubric delineates specific expectations about an essay assignment to students and provides a means of assessing completed student essays.

Teaching with this printout

More ideas to try.

Grading rubrics can be of great benefit to both you and your students. For you, a rubric saves time and decreases subjectivity. Specific criteria are explicitly stated, facilitating the grading process and increasing your objectivity. For students, the use of grading rubrics helps them to meet or exceed expectations, to view the grading process as being “fair,” and to set goals for future learning. In order to help your students meet or exceed expectations of the assignment, be sure to discuss the rubric with your students when you assign an essay. It is helpful to show them examples of written pieces that meet and do not meet the expectations. As an added benefit, because the criteria are explicitly stated, the use of the rubric decreases the likelihood that students will argue about the grade they receive. The explicitness of the expectations helps students know exactly why they lost points on the assignment and aids them in setting goals for future improvement.

• Routinely have students score peers’ essays using the rubric as the assessment tool. This increases their level of awareness of the traits that distinguish successful essays from those that fail to meet the criteria. Have peer editors use the Reviewer’s Comments section to add any praise, constructive criticism, or questions.
• Alter some expectations or add additional traits on the rubric as needed. Students’ needs may necessitate making more rigorous criteria for advanced learners or less stringent guidelines for younger or special needs students. Furthermore, the content area for which the essay is written may require some alterations to the rubric. In social studies, for example, an essay about geographical landforms and their effect on the culture of a region might necessitate additional criteria about the use of specific terminology.
• After you and your students have used the rubric, have them work in groups to make suggested alterations to the rubric to more precisely match their needs or the parameters of a particular writing assignment.
• Print this resource

Explore Resources by Grade

• Kindergarten K

Rubric Design

Main navigation, articulating your assessment values.

Reading, commenting on, and then assigning a grade to a piece of student writing requires intense attention and difficult judgment calls. Some faculty dread “the stack.” Students may share the faculty’s dim view of writing assessment, perceiving it as highly subjective. They wonder why one faculty member values evidence and correctness before all else, while another seeks a vaguely defined originality.

Writing rubrics can help address the concerns of both faculty and students by making writing assessment more efficient, consistent, and public. Whether it is called a grading rubric, a grading sheet, or a scoring guide, a writing assignment rubric lists criteria by which the writing is graded.

Why create a writing rubric?

• It makes your tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit
• It articulates community- and discipline-specific standards of excellence
• It links the grade you give the assignment to the criteria
• It can make your grading more efficient, consistent, and fair as you can read and comment with your criteria in mind
• It can help you reverse engineer your course: once you have the rubrics created, you can align your readings, activities, and lectures with the rubrics to set your students up for success
• It can help your students produce writing that you look forward to reading

How to create a writing rubric

Create a rubric at the same time you create the assignment. It will help you explain to the students what your goals are for the assignment.

• Consider your purpose: do you need a rubric that addresses the standards for all the writing in the course? Or do you need to address the writing requirements and standards for just one assignment?  Task-specific rubrics are written to help teachers assess individual assignments or genres, whereas generic rubrics are written to help teachers assess multiple assignments.
• Begin by listing the important qualities of the writing that will be produced in response to a particular assignment. It may be helpful to have several examples of excellent versions of the assignment in front of you: what writing elements do they all have in common? Among other things, these may include features of the argument, such as a main claim or thesis; use and presentation of sources, including visuals; and formatting guidelines such as the requirement of a works cited.
• Then consider how the criteria will be weighted in grading. Perhaps all criteria are equally important, or perhaps there are two or three that all students must achieve to earn a passing grade. Decide what best fits the class and requirements of the assignment.

Consider involving students in Steps 2 and 3. A class session devoted to developing a rubric can provoke many important discussions about the ways the features of the language serve the purpose of the writing. And when students themselves work to describe the writing they are expected to produce, they are more likely to achieve it.

At this point, you will need to decide if you want to create a holistic or an analytic rubric. There is much debate about these two approaches to assessment.

Comparing Holistic and Analytic Rubrics

Holistic scoring .

Holistic scoring aims to rate overall proficiency in a given student writing sample. It is often used in large-scale writing program assessment and impromptu classroom writing for diagnostic purposes.

General tenets to holistic scoring:

• Responding to drafts is part of evaluation
• Responses do not focus on grammar and mechanics during drafting and there is little correction
• Marginal comments are kept to 2-3 per page with summative comments at end
• End commentary attends to students’ overall performance across learning objectives as articulated in the assignment
• Response language aims to foster students’ self-assessment

Holistic rubrics emphasize what students do well and generally increase efficiency; they may also be more valid because scoring includes authentic, personal reaction of the reader. But holistic sores won’t tell a student how they’ve progressed relative to previous assignments and may be rater-dependent, reducing reliability. (For a summary of advantages and disadvantages of holistic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 116.)

Here is an example of a partial holistic rubric:

Summary meets all the criteria. The writer understands the article thoroughly. The main points in the article appear in the summary with all main points proportionately developed. The summary should be as comprehensive as possible and should be as comprehensive as possible and should read smoothly, with appropriate transitions between ideas. Sentences should be clear, without vagueness or ambiguity and without grammatical or mechanical errors.

A complete holistic rubric for a research paper (authored by Jonah Willihnganz) can be  downloaded here.

Analytic Scoring

Analytic scoring makes explicit the contribution to the final grade of each element of writing. For example, an instructor may choose to give 30 points for an essay whose ideas are sufficiently complex, that marshals good reasons in support of a thesis, and whose argument is logical; and 20 points for well-constructed sentences and careful copy editing.

General tenets to analytic scoring:

• Reflect emphases in your teaching and communicate the learning goals for the course
• Emphasize student performance across criterion, which are established as central to the assignment in advance, usually on an assignment sheet
• Typically take a quantitative approach, providing a scaled set of points for each criterion
• Make the analytic framework available to students before they write  

Advantages of an analytic rubric include ease of training raters and improved reliability. Meanwhile, writers often can more easily diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their work. But analytic rubrics can be time-consuming to produce, and raters may judge the writing holistically anyway. Moreover, many readers believe that writing traits cannot be separated. (For a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of analytic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 115.)

For example, a partial analytic rubric for a single trait, “addresses a significant issue”:

• Excellent: Elegantly establishes the current problem, why it matters, to whom
• Above Average: Identifies the problem; explains why it matters and to whom
• Competent: Describes topic but relevance unclear or cursory
• Developing: Unclear issue and relevance

A  complete analytic rubric for a research paper can be downloaded here.  In WIM courses, this language should be revised to name specific disciplinary conventions.

Whichever type of rubric you write, your goal is to avoid pushing students into prescriptive formulas and limiting thinking (e.g., “each paragraph has five sentences”). By carefully describing the writing you want to read, you give students a clear target, and, as Ed White puts it, “describe the ongoing work of the class” (75).

Writing rubrics contribute meaningfully to the teaching of writing. Think of them as a coaching aide. In class and in conferences, you can use the language of the rubric to help you move past generic statements about what makes good writing good to statements about what constitutes success on the assignment and in the genre or discourse community. The rubric articulates what you are asking students to produce on the page; once that work is accomplished, you can turn your attention to explaining how students can achieve it.

Works Cited

Becker, Anthony.  “Examining Rubrics Used to Measure Writing Performance in U.S. Intensive English Programs.”   The CATESOL Journal  22.1 (2010/2011):113-30. Web.

White, Edward M.  Teaching and Assessing Writing . Proquest Info and Learning, 1985. Print.

Further Resources

CCCC Committee on Assessment. “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement.” November 2006 (Revised March 2009). Conference on College Composition and Communication. Web.

Gallagher, Chris W. “Assess Locally, Validate Globally: Heuristics for Validating Local Writing Assessments.” Writing Program Administration 34.1 (2010): 10-32. Web.

Huot, Brian.  (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning.  Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Kelly-Reilly, Diane, and Peggy O’Neil, eds. Journal of Writing Assessment. Web.

McKee, Heidi A., and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss DeVoss, Eds. Digital Writing Assessment & Evaluation. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2013. Web.

O’Neill, Peggy, Cindy Moore, and Brian Huot.  A Guide to College Writing Assessment . Logan: Utah State UP, 2009. Print.

Sommers, Nancy.  Responding to Student Writers . Macmillan Higher Education, 2013.

Straub, Richard. “Responding, Really Responding to Other Students’ Writing.” The Subject is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boynton/Cook, 1999. Web.

White, Edward M., and Cassie A. Wright.  Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide . 5th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.

APPENDIX A: Sample Grading Rubrics

Discussions.

Total points per discussion: 10

Self-Reflection Journal entries

Total points per self-reflection journal entry: 3

SELF-REFLECTION ESSAY

DRAFT ESSAYS

This grading rubric is designed for the first draft of an essay. It focuses more on content and organization, and it focuses less on grammar and mechanics.

Total points per draft essay: 10

Revised Essays

This grading rubric is designed for the second draft of an essay. It focuses more on grammar and mechanics, and it focuses less on content and organization.

Total points per revised essay: 10

Synthesis Copyright © 2022 by Timothy Krause is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Grading with rubrics

Rubrics help students know how they will be assessed and make grading easier for the instructor. 

Introduction

When you’re two-thirds of the way through 35 essays on why the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland is important for an understanding of the development of American federalism, it takes a strong spirit not to want to poke your eyes out with a steak knife rather than read one more. — John Tierney in Why Teachers Secretly Hate Grading Papers

Do you enjoy spending countless hours marking assignments late into the wee hours of the morning? How about responding to endless emails from your students about assignments – questions that you have responded to multiple times in class. If the answer to both is no, then I would like to introduce you to your new best friend – the grading rubric. Once developed, the rubric will save hours of your life, as well as providing for your students in crystal clarity the purpose of their assignments.

What is a grading rubric?

A rubric is a set of criteria required for an assignment accompanied by various levels of performance. As the instructor, you simply select the comments on the rubric that match the submission (adding your own comments at your discretion). Rubrics are also useful for self and peer-assessment.

Rubrics help your students know how they will be assessed. They also make grading easier for the instructor. Rubrics are useful for assessing essays, projects, and tests or quizzes with a written component. Check out these  examples  from Carnegie Mellon.

There are two main types of rubrics: holistic and analytical.

Holistic Rubrics

Holistic rubrics evaluate the overall quality of an assignment.  They are quick, efficient, and fair, and they allow for the assessment of higher-order thinking in which any number of responses may be offered by the student. The shortcomings of holistic rubrics include a lack of specific feedback for the student (unless you include these in your comments). Holistic rubrics generally serve better as summative rather than formative feedback.

Analytical rubrics

Analytical rubrics include a set of criteria on the left side of a grid with levels of performance along the top row (see the example below). Typically the corresponding cells include a description of each criteria at each level of performance. When grading assignments, the instructor checks off each of the appropriate criteria and may choose to include brief written comments below. Analytical rubrics can effectively provide specific feedback that highlights strengths and struggles. The drawbacks of an analytical rubric include the time needed to develop the rubrics, specifically the time and thought that is required to write well-defined and clear criterion. This time is arguably well-spent as the goals and outcomes of the assignment will be explicit for both instructor and student. In the long term, analytical rubrics are a time saver – time invested into their development is quickly paid off during the marking process.

See below for templates of holistic and analytical rubrics:

Template for Holistic Rubrics

Template for Analytic Rubrics

Nilson, L. (2016).  Teaching at its best : A research-based resource for college instructors  4th ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom.  Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation , 7(25). Retrieved from   https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol7/iss1/25/  

Benefits of rubrics

Rubrics are helpful for instructors and students on many levels. Rubrics are good for students because:

• Students know what is expected.
• Students see that learning is about gaining specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
• Students may self-assess to reflect on their learning.

Rubrics are good for instructors because:

• Teachers and students are clear on what is being assessed.
• Teachers may consistently assess student work without having to re-write similar comments.
• Teachers with high marking loads save considerable time.

The rubric  design  process is also beneficial. Designing a rubric enables the instructor to take a close look at the purpose of the assignment. The process allows the instructor to enhance or more clearly articulate the purpose and intended learning outcomes of the assignment for the students.

How to design a rubric

• Decide what criteria or essential elements must be present in the student’s work to ensure that it is high in quality. At this stage, you might even consider selecting samples of exemplary student work that can be shown to students when setting assignments.
• Decide how many levels of achievement you will include on the rubric and how they will relate to your institution’s definition of grades as well as your own grading scheme.
• For each criterion, component, or essential element of quality, describe in detail what the performance at each achievement level looks like.
• Leave space for additional, tailored comments or overall impressions and a final grade.

Develop a different rubric for each assignment 

Although this takes time in the beginning, you’ll find that rubrics can be changed slightly or re-used later.  If you are seeking pre-existing rubrics, consider Rhodes (2009) for the AAC&U VALUE rubrics, cited below, or Facione and Facione (1994). Whether you develop your own or use an existing rubric, practice with any other graders in your course to achieve inter-rater reliability.

Be transparent

Give students a copy of the rubric when you assign the performance task. These are not meant to be surprise criteria. Hand the rubric back with the assignment.

Integrate rubrics into assignments

Require students to attach the rubric to the assignment when they hand it in. Some instructors ask students to self-assess or give peer feedback using the rubric prior to handing in the work. 

Leverage rubrics to manage your time

When you mark the assignment, circle or highlight the achieved level of performance for each criterion on the rubric. This is where you will save a great deal of time, as no comments are required. Include any additional specific or overall comments that do not fit within the rubric’s criteria.

Be prepared to revise your rubrics

Decide upon a final grade for the assignment based on the rubric. If you find, as some do, that presented work meets criteria on the rubric but nevertheless seems to have exceeded or not met the overall qualities you’re seeking, revise the rubric accordingly for the next time you teach the course. If the work achieves highly in some areas of the rubric but not in others, decide in advance how the assignment grade is actually derived. Some use a formula, or multiplier, to give different weightings to various components; be explicit about this right on the rubric. 

Consider developing online rubrics

If an assignment is being submitted to an electronic drop box you may be able to develop and use an online rubric. The scores from these rubrics are automatically entered in the online grade book in the course management system.

*Creative commons source:  Rubrics: Useful assessment tools. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.

Rubric examples

Developing Rubrics  A storehouse of examples and resources for developing rubrics.

The Center for Teaching and Learning (Humber College). (n.d.).  Teaching methods: Developing rubrics.  Retrieved from:  http://www.humber.ca/centreforteachingandlearning/instructional-strategies/teaching-methods/course-development-tools/creating-assignment-rubrics.html

Guide to Rating Critical & Integrative Thinking , Washington State University, Fall 2006, Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology. Retrieved from:   http://www.cpcc.edu/learningcollege/learning-outcomes/rubrics/WST_Rubric.pdf

Grading and Performance Rubrics

Examples  of rubrics from various disciplines (scroll down the web page to find them) Eberly Center: Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation (Carnegie Mellon). (n.d.).  Grading and performance rubrics.  Retrieved from:  http:// www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html

Reliable Rubrics  A creative commons bank of rubrics from a variety of disciplines.

Rubric template

Sample rubric for a research paper

Adapted from  Written Report Assessment Template , Compiled from the following sources: Project Literary among Youth, 2002,  http://www.kidsplay.org/100w/rubric.html . Kansas State University, 2005. Rubric for Research Paper

Resources and references

Centre for Teaching Excellence (University of Waterloo). (n.d.).  Rubrics: Useful assessment tools . Retrieved from  https:// uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching- tips/assessing-student-work/grading-and-feedback/rubrics-useful-assessment-tools

Davis, B. (2009).  Tools for teaching  (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Eberly Center: Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation (Carnegie Mellon). (n.d.).  Grading and  performance rubrics.  Retrieved from:  http ://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html

Guide to Rating Critical & Integrative Thinking, Washington State University, Fall 2006, Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology. Retrieved from:  https://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/CIT_Rubric_2006.pdf

Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom.  Practical Assessment, Research &  Evaluation , 7(25). Retrieved from  http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25

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• Designing and Using Rubrics

Grading rubrics (structured scoring guides) can make writing criteria more explicit, improving student performance and making valid and consistent grading easier for course instructors. This page provides an overview of rubric types and offers guidelines for their development and use.

Why use a rubric?

• Types of Rubrics

Guidelines for Creating a Writing Rubric

Additional Ways to Use Rubrics

• Downsides to Rubrics?
• Further Resources

While grading criteria can come in many forms—a checklist of requirements, a description of grade-level expectations, articulated standards, or a contract between instructor and students, to name but a few options—they often take the form of a rubric, a structured scoring guide. 

Because of their flexibility, rubrics can provide several benefits for students and instructors:

• They make the grading criteria explicit to students by providing specific dimensions (e.g. thesis, organization, use of evidence. etc.), the performance-level descriptions for those dimensions, and the relative weight of those dimensions within the overall assignment.
• They can serve as guidelines and targets for students as they develop their writing, especially when the rubrics are distributed with the assignment.
• They can be used by faculty to coach and reinforce writing criteria in the class.
• They are useful for norming assessment and ensuring reliability and consistency among multiple graders, such as teaching assistants . 
• They can help instructors to isolate specific features of student writing for praise or for instruction.
• They are very adaptable in form–from basic to complex—and can be used to assess minor and major assignments.
• They can be a data source for instructors to improve future teaching and learning.

What types of rubrics are there?

Rubrics come in many forms. Here are some of the key types, using terms introduced by John Bean (2011) , along with the advantages and disadvantages of rubric types, as detailed by the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA ).

Holistic Rubrics stress an overall evaluation of the work by creating single-score categories (letter or numeric). Holistic rubrics are often used in standardized assessments, such as Advanced Placement exams. Here is a sample of a holistic rubric .

Some potential benefits of holistic rubrics:

• They often save time by minimizing the number of decisions graders must make.
• Multiple graders (such as teaching assistants) who norm with holistic rubrics tend to apply them consistently, resulting in more reliable measurement.
• They are good for summative assessments that do not require additional feedback.

Some potential challenges of holistic rubrics:

• Unless space is provided for specific comments, they are less useful for offering specific feedback to learners about how to improve performance.
• They are not very useful for formative assessments , where the goal is to provide actionable feedback for the student.

Analytic Rubrics stress the weight of different criteria or traits, such as content, organization, use of conventions, etc. Most analytic rubrics are formatted as grids. Here is a sample of an analytic rubric .

Some potential benefits of analytic rubrics:

• They provide useful feedback to learners on specific areas of strength and weakness.
• Their dimensions can be weighted to reflect the relative importance of individual criteria on the assignment.
• They can show learners that they have made progress over time in some or all dimensions when the same rubric categories are used repeatedly ( Moskal, 2000 ).

Some potential challenges of analytic rubrics:

• As Tedick (2002) notes, "Separate scores for different aspects of a student’s writing or speaking performance may be considered artificial in that it does not give the teacher (or student) a good assessment of the ‘whole’ of a performance."
• They often take more time to create and use, and it can be challenging to name all the possible attributes that will signal success or failure on the assignment.
• Because there are more dimensions to score, it can take more time to norm and achieve reliability. 
• Given evidence that graders tend to evaluate grammar-related categories more harshly than they do other categories ( McNamara, 1996 ), analytic rubrics containing a category for “grammar” may provide a negatively skewed picture of a learners' proficiency.

Generic Rubrics can take holistic or analytic forms. In generic rubrics, the grading criteria are generalized in such a way that the rubric can be used for multiple assignments and/or across multiple sections of courses. Here is a sample of a generic rubric .

Some potential benefits of generic rubrics:

• They can be applied to a number of different tasks across a single mode of communication (such as persuasion, analysis, oral presentation, etc.).
• They can be used repeatedly for assignments with fixed formats and genres (lab reports, technical memos, etc.).
• They may be useful in departments for collecting data about student performance across courses.

Some potential challenges of generic rubrics:

• They are not directly aligned with the language in the assignment prompt.
• They may reinforce a singular and reductive view of effective writing.

Task-Specific Rubrics closely align the grading criteria with the language and specifications in the assignment prompt. Here is a sample of a task-specific rubric .

Some potential benefits of task-specific rubrics:

• According to Walvoord (2014) , task-specific rubrics can be “credible and actionable for students because they involve faculty in their own disciplinary language, their own assignments, and their own criteria.”
• They emphasize the specificity of discipline and genre-based writing.
• They can be useful for both formative and summative feedback.

Some potential challenges of task-specific rubrics:

• They take some time to develop.
• They are not easily transferable to other assignments. 

Step 1: Identify your grading criteria.

What are the intended outcomes for the assignment? What do you want students to do or demonstrate? What are the primary dimensions (note: these are often referred to as “traits” or as “criteria”) that count in the evaluation? Try writing each one as a noun or noun phrase—for example, “Insights and ideas that are central to the assignment”; “Address of audience”; “Logic of organization”; “Integration of source materials.”

Suggestion: Try not to exceed more than ten total criteria. If you have too many criteria, you can make it challenging to distinguish among them, and you may be required to clarify, repeatedly, the distinctions for students (or for yourself!).

Step 2: Describe the levels of success for each criterion.

For each trait or criterion, consider a 2–4-point scale (e.g. strong, satisfactory, weak). For each point on the scale, describe the performance.

Suggestions : Either begin with optimum performances and then describe lower levels as less than (adequately, insufficiently, etc.) OR fully describe a baseline performance and then add values. To write an effective performance level for a criterion, describe in precise language what the text is doing successfully.

Effective grading criteria are…

• Explicit and well detailed, and leave little room for unstated assumptions.

Ineffective: Includes figures and graphs.

Effective: Includes figures that are legible and labeled accurately, and that illustrate data in a manner free from distortion. 

• Focused on qualities, not components, segments, or sections.

Ineffective: Use the IMRAD structure.

Effective: Includes a materials and methods section that identify all components, technical standards, equipment, and methodological description such that a professional might reproduce the research. 

• Address discrete features and try not to do too much.

Ineffective: Contains at least five sources.

Effective: Uses research from carefully vetted sources, presented with an in-text and terminal citation, to support assertions.

• Address observable characteristics of writing, not impressions of writer’s intent.

Ineffective: Does not use slang or jargon.

Effective: Uses language appropriate to fellow professionals and patient communication in context.

Step 3: Weight the criteria.

When criteria have been identified and performance-levels described, decisions should be made about their varying importance in relation to each other.

Suggestion: If you use a point-based grading system, consider using a range of points within  performance levels, and make sure the points for each criterion reflect their relative value to one another. Rubrics without carefully determined and relative grade weights can often produce a final score that does not align with the instructor’s expectations for the score. Here is a sample of a rubric with a range of points within each performance level .

Step 4: Create a format for the rubric.

When the specific criteria and levels of success have been named and ranked, they can be sorted into a variety of formats and distributed with the assignment. The right format will depend on how and when you are using the rubric. Consider these three examples of an Anthropology rubric and how each format might be useful (or not), depending on the course context. [ Rubric 1 , Rubric 2 , Rubric 3 ]

Suggestion: Consider allowing space on the rubric to insert comments on each item and again at the end. Regardless of how well your rubric identifies, describes, and weighs the grading criteria, students will still appreciate and benefit from brief comments that personalize your assessment.

Step 5: Test (and refine) the rubric.

Ideally, a rubric will be tested in advance of full implementation. A practical way to test the rubric is to apply it to a subset of student assignments. Even after you have tested and used the rubric, you will likely discover, as with the assignment prompt itself, that there are parts that need tweaking and refinement.

Suggestion: A peer review of the rubric before it gets used on an assignment will allow you to take stock of the questions, confusions, or issues students have about your rubric, so you can make timely and effective adjustments.

Beyond their value as formative and summative assessment tools, rubrics can be used to support teaching and learning in the classroom.

Here are three suggestions for additional uses:

• For in-class norming sessions with students—effective for discussing, clarifying, and reinforcing writing criteria;
• For constructing rubric criteria and values with students—most effective when students are quite familiar with the specific writing genre (e.g. capstone-level writing);
• For guiding a peer-review session

Any Downsides to Rubrics?

While many faculty members use rubrics, some resist them because they worry that rubrics are unable to accurately convey authentic and nuanced assessment. As Bob Broad (2003) argues, rubrics can leave out many of the rhetorical qualities and contexts that influence how well a work is received or not. Rubrics, Broad maintains, convey a temporary sense of standardization that does not capture the real ways that real readers respond in different ways to a given work. John Bean (2011) has also described this as the “myth of the universal reader” and the “problem of implied precision” (279). Of course, the alternative to using a rubric, such as providing a holistic grade with comments that justify the grade—still a common practice among instructors—is often labor-intensive and poses its own set of challenges when it comes to consistency with assessment across all students enrolled in a course. Ultimately, a rubric’s impact depends on the criteria on which it is built and the ways it is used.

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Essay Papers Writing Online

Effective essay writing rubrics to enhance students’ skills and performance.

Essay writing is a fundamental skill that students must master to succeed academically. To help students improve their writing, educators often use rubrics as a tool for assessment and feedback. An essay writing rubric is a set of criteria that outlines what is expected in a well-crafted essay, providing students with clear guidelines for success.

Effective essay writing rubrics not only evaluate the quality of the content but also assess the organization, coherence, language use, and overall structure of an essay. By using a rubric, students can better understand what aspects of their writing need improvement and how to achieve higher grades.

This article will explore the importance of essay writing rubrics in academic success and provide tips on how students can use them to enhance their writing skills. By understanding and mastering the criteria outlined in a rubric, students can not only improve their writing but also excel in their academic endeavors.

Learn the Key Elements

When it comes to effective essay writing, understanding the key elements is essential for academic success. Here are some important elements to keep in mind:

• Thesis Statement: A clear and concise thesis statement that presents the main idea of your essay.
• Structure: A well-organized structure with introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
• Evidence: Use relevant evidence and examples to support your arguments.
• Analysis: Analyze the evidence provided and draw conclusions based on your analysis.
• Clarity and Coherence: Ensure that your essay is clear, coherent, and easy to follow.

By mastering these key elements, you can improve your essay writing skills and achieve academic success.

Elements of Effective Essay Writing

When it comes to writing a successful essay, there are several key elements that you should keep in mind to ensure your work is of high quality. Here are some essential aspects to consider:

Understand the Importance

Understanding the importance of essay writing rubrics is crucial for academic success. Rubrics provide clear criteria for evaluating and assessing essays, which helps both students and instructors. They help students understand what is expected of them, leading to more focused and organized writing. Rubrics also provide consistency in grading, ensuring that all students are evaluated fairly and objectively. By using rubrics, students can see where they excel and where they need to improve, making the feedback process more constructive and impactful.

of Clear and Concise Rubrics

One key aspect of effective essay writing rubrics is the clarity and conciseness of the criteria they outline. Clear and concise rubrics provide students with a roadmap for success and make grading more efficient for instructors. When creating rubrics, it is essential to clearly define the expectations for each aspect of the essay, including content, organization, style, and grammar.

By using language that is straightforward and easy to understand, students can easily grasp what is expected of them and how they will be evaluated. Additionally, concise rubrics avoid confusion and ambiguity, which can lead to frustration and misunderstanding among students.

Furthermore, clear and concise rubrics help instructors provide more targeted feedback to students, allowing them to focus on specific areas for improvement. This ultimately leads to better learning outcomes and helps students develop their writing skills more effectively.

Implement Structured Guidelines

Structured guidelines are essential for effective essay writing. These guidelines provide a framework for organizing your thoughts, ideas, and arguments in a logical and coherent manner. By implementing structured guidelines, you can ensure that your essay is well-organized, cohesive, and easy to follow.

One important aspect of structured guidelines is creating an outline before you start writing. An outline helps you plan the structure of your essay, including the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. It also helps you organize your ideas and ensure that your arguments flow logically from one point to the next.

Another important aspect of structured guidelines is using transitions to connect your ideas and arguments. Transitions help readers follow the flow of your essay and understand how one point relates to the next. They also help maintain the coherence and clarity of your writing.

Finally, structured guidelines include formatting requirements such as word count, font size, spacing, and citation style. Adhering to these formatting requirements ensures that your essay meets academic standards and is visually appealing to readers.

for Academic Excellence

When aiming for academic excellence in essay writing, it is essential to adhere to rigorous standards and criteria set by the educational institution. The use of effective essay writing rubrics can greatly enhance the quality of academic work by providing clear guidelines and criteria for assessment.

Academic excellence in essay writing involves demonstrating a deep understanding of the subject matter, presenting a well-structured argument, and showcasing critical thinking skills. Rubrics can help students focus on key elements such as thesis development, evidence analysis, organization, and clarity of expression.

By following a well-designed rubric, students can ensure that their essays meet the desired academic standards and expectations. Feedback provided based on the rubric can also help students identify areas for improvement and guide them towards achieving academic success.

Master the Art

Mastering the art of essay writing requires dedication, practice, and attention to detail. To become a proficient essay writer, one must develop strong writing skills, a clear and logical structure, as well as an effective argumentative style. Start by understanding the purpose of your essay and conducting thorough research to gather relevant information and evidence to support your claims.

Furthermore, pay close attention to grammar, punctuation, and spelling to ensure your work is polished and professional. Use essay writing rubrics as a guide to help you stay on track and meet the necessary criteria for academic success. Practice makes perfect, so don’t be afraid to revise and edit your work to improve your writing skills even further.

By mastering the art of essay writing through consistent practice and attention to detail, you can set yourself up for academic success and develop a valuable skill that will benefit you in various aspects of your life.

of Constructing Detailed Evaluations

Constructing detailed evaluations in essay writing rubrics is essential for providing specific feedback to students. When designing a rubric, it is important to consider the criteria that will be assessed and clearly define each level of performance. This involves breaking down the evaluation criteria into smaller, measurable components, which allows for more precise and accurate assessments.

Each criterion in the rubric should have a clear description of what is expected at each level of performance, from basic to proficient to advanced. This helps students understand the expectations and enables them to self-assess their work against the rubric. Additionally, including specific examples or descriptors for each level can further clarify the expectations and provide guidance to students.

Constructing detailed evaluations also involves ensuring that the rubric aligns with the learning objectives of the assignment. By mapping the evaluation criteria to the desired learning outcomes, instructors can ensure that the rubric accurately reflects what students are expected to demonstrate in their essays. This alignment helps students see the relevance of the assessment criteria and encourages them to strive for mastery of the material.

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Eberly Center

Teaching excellence & educational innovation, creating and using rubrics.

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly describes the instructor’s performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric identifies:

• criteria: the aspects of performance (e.g., argument, evidence, clarity) that will be assessed
• descriptors: the characteristics associated with each dimension (e.g., argument is demonstrable and original, evidence is diverse and compelling)
• performance levels: a rating scale that identifies students’ level of mastery within each criterion  

Rubrics can be used to provide feedback to students on diverse types of assignments, from papers, projects, and oral presentations to artistic performances and group projects.

Benefitting from Rubrics

• reduce the time spent grading by allowing instructors to refer to a substantive description without writing long comments
• help instructors more clearly identify strengths and weaknesses across an entire class and adjust their instruction appropriately
• help to ensure consistency across time and across graders
• reduce the uncertainty which can accompany grading
• discourage complaints about grades
• understand instructors’ expectations and standards
• use instructor feedback to improve their performance
• monitor and assess their progress as they work towards clearly indicated goals
• recognize their strengths and weaknesses and direct their efforts accordingly

Examples of Rubrics

Here we are providing a sample set of rubrics designed by faculty at Carnegie Mellon and other institutions. Although your particular field of study or type of assessment may not be represented, viewing a rubric that is designed for a similar assessment may give you ideas for the kinds of criteria, descriptions, and performance levels you use on your own rubric.

• Example 1: Philosophy Paper This rubric was designed for student papers in a range of courses in philosophy (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 2: Psychology Assignment Short, concept application homework assignment in cognitive psychology (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 3: Anthropology Writing Assignments This rubric was designed for a series of short writing assignments in anthropology (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 4: History Research Paper . This rubric was designed for essays and research papers in history (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 1: Capstone Project in Design This rubric describes the components and standards of performance from the research phase to the final presentation for a senior capstone project in design (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 2: Engineering Design Project This rubric describes performance standards for three aspects of a team project: research and design, communication, and team work.

Oral Presentations

• Example 1: Oral Exam This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing performance on an oral exam in an upper-division course in history (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 2: Oral Communication This rubric is adapted from Huba and Freed, 2000.
• Example 3: Group Presentations This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing group presentations in history (Carnegie Mellon).

Class Participation/Contributions

• Example 1: Discussion Class This rubric assesses the quality of student contributions to class discussions. This is appropriate for an undergraduate-level course (Carnegie Mellon).
• Example 2: Advanced Seminar This rubric is designed for assessing discussion performance in an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar.

See also " Examples and Tools " section of this site for more rubrics.

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Assessment Rubrics

A rubric is commonly defined as a tool that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing criteria, and for each criteria, describing levels of quality (Andrade, 2000; Arter & Chappuis, 2007; Stiggins, 2001). Criteria are used in determining the level at which student work meets expectations. Markers of quality give students a clear idea about what must be done to demonstrate a certain level of mastery, understanding, or proficiency (i.e., "Exceeds Expectations" does xyz, "Meets Expectations" does only xy or yz, "Developing" does only x or y or z). Rubrics can be used for any assignment in a course, or for any way in which students are asked to demonstrate what they've learned. They can also be used to facilitate self and peer-reviews of student work.

Rubrics aren't just for summative evaluation. They can be used as a teaching tool as well. When used as part of a formative assessment, they can help students understand both the holistic nature and/or specific analytics of learning expected, the level of learning expected, and then make decisions about their current level of learning to inform revision and improvement (Reddy & Andrade, 2010). 

Why use rubrics?

Rubrics help instructors:

Provide students with feedback that is clear, directed and focused on ways to improve learning.

Demystify assignment expectations so students can focus on the work instead of guessing "what the instructor wants."

Reduce time spent on grading and develop consistency in how you evaluate student learning across students and throughout a class.

Rubrics help students:

Focus their efforts on completing assignments in line with clearly set expectations.

Self and Peer-reflect on their learning, making informed changes to achieve the desired learning level.

Developing a Rubric

During the process of developing a rubric, instructors might:

Select an assignment for your course - ideally one you identify as time intensive to grade, or students report as having unclear expectations.

Decide what you want students to demonstrate about their learning through that assignment. These are your criteria.

Identify the markers of quality on which you feel comfortable evaluating students’ level of learning - often along with a numerical scale (i.e., "Accomplished," "Emerging," "Beginning" for a developmental approach).

Give students the rubric ahead of time. Advise them to use it in guiding their completion of the assignment.

It can be overwhelming to create a rubric for every assignment in a class at once, so start by creating one rubric for one assignment. See how it goes and develop more from there! Also, do not reinvent the wheel. Rubric templates and examples exist all over the Internet, or consider asking colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments. 

Sample Rubrics

Examples of holistic and analytic rubrics : see Tables 2 & 3 in “Rubrics: Tools for Making Learning Goals and Evaluation Criteria Explicit for Both Teachers and Learners” (Allen & Tanner, 2006)

Examples across assessment types : see “Creating and Using Rubrics,” Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and & Educational Innovation

“VALUE Rubrics” : see the Association of American Colleges and Universities set of free, downloadable rubrics, with foci including creative thinking, problem solving, and information literacy. 

Andrade, H. 2000. Using rubrics to promote thinking and learning. Educational Leadership 57, no. 5: 13–18. Arter, J., and J. Chappuis. 2007. Creating and recognizing quality rubrics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall. Stiggins, R.J. 2001. Student-involved classroom assessment. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reddy, Y., & Andrade, H. (2010). A review of rubric use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation In Higher Education, 35(4), 435-448.