What is a Grading Rubric?

How much would you pay for a tool that can help you assess student performance while offering a uniform structure that makes the grades clear, helps students understand assignment expectations, and makes grading easier on the instructor?  Luckily, you can have all of this and more for free when you adopt a well-designed grading rubric.

What is a Grading Rubric?

A grading rubric is a coherent set of criteria to assess the students’ work that includes descriptions of levels of performance quality for each criterion.  By offering a descriptive document identifying the various values of components of an assignment, the grading rubric helps students understand the manner in which the assignment will be assessed.

Why would I want a Grading Rubric?

Whether or not you use group headings to classify different criterion, i.e. holistic rubrics, or simply list all the criteria separately, i.e. analytic rubrics, both offer several benefits for the instructor and the students (Carriveau, 2010). After implementing a grading rubric, students’ scores at Washington University improved 3.5 times over their pre-rubric performance (Kelly-Riley, Brown, Condon, & Law, 2001).  This is not surprising since students can benefit from grading rubrics in many ways, including:

• Encouraging critical thinking by increasing students’ ability to notice recurring issues that they can address to improve their work.
• Facilitating communication about assessment that gives students insight illustrating what is expected from them and key aspects about assignment. This can help the student outside of class as well, for example, they can share the rubric with tutors to get focused help.
• Making feedback timely and this is critical for student success. (Rucker & Thomson, 2003)

Grading Rubrics also assist instructors by:

• Illustrating how effective instructional materials are at preparing students for assessments.
• Offering insight on areas where students need the most help
• Providing information to refine our teaching skills.
• Ensuring consistency in grading across courses
• Reducing time spent writing comments when grading because of preset substantive descriptions. 

With all these benefits, the real question is why wouldn’t you want to use a grading rubric?

References

Carriveau, R. (2010). Connecting the Dots. Denton, TX: Fancy Fox Publications, Inc.

Kelly-Riley, D., Brown, G., Condon, B., & Law, R. (2001). Washington State University critical thinking project resource guide. Retrieved from https://web.uri.edu/assessment/files/WSU-Critical-Thinking-Project-Resource-Guide.pdf

Rucker, M. L., & Thomson, S. (2003). Assessing student learning outcomes: An investigation of the relationship among feedback measures. College Student Journal, 37(3), 400–404.