appropriate goal or thesis for the paper.

For example, depending on what the instructor wants to see the students achieving in their papers, any of the following elements (plus many others) could be detailed in the rubric, with particular numeric values:

The rubric for a formal paper might award points for particular aspects of the paper. For instance, the rubric for assessing a formal paper would be quite different from the rubric for a student poster or lab report. It is up to the instructor to develop the rubric for particular types of student work, in line with the course’s overall learning objectives and the learning objectives for particular assignments.

For instance, multiple choice exams do not require a rubric, and rubrics may not be appropriate for certain types of student self-assessment. While rubrics can be extremely useful and helpful in assessing student work, Selke (2013, chapter 4) also points out that not every type of student work requires a rubric. Asking colleagues if they have used rubrics in their courses may also be helpful – it may be possible to use a rubric that a colleague has already developed. One suggestion is to develop rubrics for just one or two assignments in your course and see how that goes. 7)ĭeveloping a rubric may be time consuming, especially the first time. It also saved the professor from the tedium of repeatedly making many of the same corrections, writing long explanations of what had been thought to be readily apparent, or being so bogged down in addressing mechanical errors that conceptualizations were sidelined.” (p. Goggins Selke (2013) remarks that using grading rubrics usually results in higher quality and better conceptualized papers, with less time needed “to score the papers and more of that time… devoted to writing feedback pertinent to the content, providing encouragement and critical assessment of reasoning and suggesting additional sources, authors or approaches to the topic… Using the rubric helped the students get beyond mechanics to concentrate on the content of the paper. In her excellent book on rubrics in higher education, Mary J. It is also a very good idea to share the rubric with any Teaching Assistants for the course, thus enabling them to see what the instructor wants the students to achieve in their work and helping to maintain consistent grading from all the TAs. Sharing the rubric for a particular type of work with the students when giving an assessment can be very useful, both for the students and the instructor. The letter grade is probably the most common and well known grading rubric, but there are many others that could be used in different situations. The standard marking scheme of A, B, C, D, F is a type of grading rubric, whereby those letters are assigned certain percentage values out of 100% or are given a named value such as Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, and Failure. The rubric guides how the student’s work will be assessed, and indicates the weight that will be given to the various elements of the work.Īll instructors have used a grading rubric whether they realize it or not. Rubrics can enhance the consistency, transparency, and fairness for assessing all sorts of student work, including exams, papers, projects, posters, group work, oral presentations, lab reports, pop quizzes, class participation, etc. Rubrics can be used anywhere evaluation is required, such as staff performance, interviewing job applicants, designing a survey, rating the safety of products and, in academia, assessing student work. A rubric is simply an evaluative measurement system or scheme.

Grading rubric percentages