Creating Rubrics | Waubonsee Community College

What exactly is a Rubric?

A rubric is a scoring tool that is developed by the instructor to guide the evaluation of students’ work on performance assessment tasks. Rubrics contain the essential criteria for the performance assessment task and appropriate levels of performance for each criterion. These criteria and performance standards are commonly arranged in a matrix to enable instructors to evaluate students’ work efficiently and to help students to understand how their work will be evaluated.

Rubrics are most commonly employed to assess written work of all kinds, but they can also be used to evaluate projects, field experiences, performances, and any other assessment that requires the instructor to make a judgment of quality.

Why use Rubrics?

The advantages of using rubrics as a part of the grading process involve fundamental best practices in teaching and learning such as providing students with explicit performance expectations and qualitative feedback on their work. Generally speaking, using rubrics makes life easier for instructors and improves student achievement. More specific benefits of using rubrics include:

Rubrics help to clarify vague, fuzzy goals.

Instructors who have clear expectations of student performance in mind are more likely to produce valid and reliable assessments of students’ work. Students who better understand what exactly they are expected to do, where they should focus their energies, and the quality of work that merits the possible performance levels will result in fewer questions about expectations, a more rewarding experience for students, and superior achievement.

Rubrics improve feedback to students and can help them self-improve.

If instructors encourage students to use the rubric to self-evaluate their work before turning it in, they are helping them to develop the critical lifelong skill of metacognition. Marked rubrics give students detailed qualitative feedback on their performance that they can use to improve that is superior to a few marked comments on a paper.

Rubrics make scoring more accurate, unbiased, and reliable.

They ensure that every assignment or assessment is evaluated using the same criteria so that instructors grade groups of students consistently and multiple instructors who use the same rubric grade similarly.

Rubrics make scoring easier and faster.

While using a scoring guide may seem to add an extra burden to the grading process, rubrics actually make the process faster because they remind the instructor of what they are looking for and require fewer written comments.

Rubrics provide clear expectations to students.

Explicit and clearly-articulated criteria help to mitigate student questions about their grades (“Why did he get a B- when I got a C+?”). Students will better understand what is expected of them and why they receive the scores they receive. As a result, conversations with them can focus on how they can improve rather than the defense of the instructor’s grading practice.

Rubric Types

The two main types of rubrics are analytic rubrics and holistic rubrics. The main difference between the two is that analytic rubrics allow for the separate evaluation of each criterion while holistic rubrics require the evaluation of the criteria as a set.

Analytic Rubrics

Analytic rubrics allow instructors to evaluate a student’s performance on each criterion separately. The series of scores for each criterion are then summed to obtain a total score on the task. Analytic rubrics include checklist, rating scale, and descriptive rubrics.

Checklist rubrics are simple lists that include only the criteria for the performance assessment task. Students are evaluated based on the presence of each criterion, as opposed to the degree of mastery they exhibited, in their work. Higher education tends to require more sophisticated evaluations than what checklist rubrics allow, but instructors may choose this type of rubric, for example, when they observe student performance in a lab setting (see Sample 2), a studio setting, etc., or to enable students to self-assess their work before they turn it in (see Sample 3).

Rating scale rubrics include a list of criteria for the performance assessment task as well as a rating scale of performance levels to indicate students’ level of proficiency for each criterion (see Sample 4). While rating scale rubrics allow for a more detailed evaluation than do checklist rubrics, the major shortcoming of this type of rubric is that performance levels are not clearly described. Consequently, instructors may rate students’ performance inconsistently and the feedback students receive may not be detailed enough for them to know how to improve. Still, rating scale rubrics are easy to create and use, so they do have an important place in higher education, especially for relatively minor assignments.

Descriptive rubrics include a list of criteria for the performance assessment task as well as a rating scale of performance levels to indicate students’ level of proficiency, but they replace the checkboxes of rating scale rubrics with descriptors of the performances that merit each possible performance level (see Sample 1 and Sample 5). Descriptive rubrics explicitly document the standards of student performance so that instructors and students alike can understand exactly what an “excellent” or “inadequate” rating means. As a result, this type of rubric is considered the gold standard of rubrics and is becoming increasingly popular in higher education.

Holistic Rubrics

While analytic rubrics list performance criteria separately, holistic rubrics have short narrative descriptions or grouped sets of criteria for the various performance levels (see Sample 6). This type of rubric allows for faster evaluations in situations where there is a tight time frame, the assessment is summative, and qualitative feedback to individual students is not needed. The shortcoming of this type of rubric is that it can be difficult for instructors to consistently evaluate student work because few works will meet any one description precisely. Also, holistic rubrics do not yield information on students’ specific strengths and weaknesses.

Which Type of Rubric is Best?

Descriptive Rubrics

Descriptive rubrics represent the gold standard of rubrics. The descriptors that spell out what is expected of students at each performance level for each criterion make the assessment more reliable so that an instructor can evaluate a group of students’ work more consistently and multiple instructors using the same rubric grade similarly. Without descriptors, it can be difficult to discern the difference between performance level labels such as “excellent” and “very good.” The descriptors also help students to understand exactly what good (or bad) performance looks like at each level and enable instructors to give them more detailed feedback so they can clearly recognize areas of their work that need improvement.

Rating Scale Rubrics

Rating scale rubrics are an alternative to descriptive rubrics for smaller assignments or assessments and when time to evaluate students’ work is scarce. While they provide more sophisticated evaluations of students’ work than do checklist rubrics, rating scale rubrics are not as reliable as descriptive rubrics because their lack of descriptors can make it difficult to differentiate between performance levels. Still, rating scale rubrics are relatively easy to create and use.

Holistic Rubrics

Holistic rubrics may be used when an assessment project is so massive that analytic rubrics would take too much time, such as students’ entrance essays or senior portfolio projects. Holistic rubrics may also be appropriate for minor assignments for which a quick holistic judgment is sufficient. Remember, though, that this type of rubric can prove unreliable if instructors struggle to distinguish between the performance levels.

Checklist Rubrics

Checklist rubrics are appropriate for simple assessments such as those in which the mere presence of the criteria is what is being evaluated.

How are Rubrics created?

While there is no exact formula an instructor can follow every time a rubric is created, what follows is a basic process that may be effective for most rubric types and for most assignments or assessments.

Step 1: Develop a List of Criteria

The first step in this process is to list the criteria that students need to demonstrate in the completed assignment or assessment. This step applies to the creation of all rubric types. Consider the following questions as you envision the criteria:

Why are we giving students this assignment? What do we want students to learn by completing it?
What are the knowledge and skills we want students to demonstrate in this assignment?
What are the characteristics of good student work? What are the characteristics of good writing, a good presentation, or a good lab report?
What specific characteristics do we want to see in completed assignments?

If the first draft of criteria is long, it should be revised to include a manageable number of criteria. Rubrics that include too many criteria are more time-consuming to score and make performance expectations less clear to students. Effective rubrics should have between three and eight criteria. To shorten the list, reduce it to the most significant tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities students need to demonstrate. Then edit the list so that each criterion is expressed using concrete terms and action verbs.

Step 2: Create Performance Levels

The second step in this process is to define the performance levels that make up the rating scale. This step applies to rating scale, descriptive, and holistic rubrics. Consider the following possible performance level terms:

Exceeds standard, meets standard, approaching standard, below standard
Complete evidence, partial evidence, minimal evidence, no evidence
Excellent, very good, adequate, marginal, inadequate

Begin by establishing performance levels for adequate and inadequate performance, plus an exemplary level to motivate students to achieve more than what is merely adequate. If more performance levels are needed, consider adding intermediate levels between “inadequate” and “adequate” and between “adequate” and “exemplary.” Effective rubrics should have between four and five performance levels. If more than five levels are established, instructors may struggle to differentiate between the various levels.

Step 3: Articulate Performance Descriptors

The final step in this process is to create descriptors for each criterion at each performance level. This step applies to descriptive rubrics only. Consider the following central question when articulating descriptors:

What kind of work merits scoring a student’s work for this criterion at this level?

Remember that effective descriptors use descriptions of rather than judgments about students’ work. If vague or overly-subjective language is used, the descriptors will not help to clarify the difference between the performance levels. For example, “uses good grammar” is less clear and more subjective than “contains no grammatical errors.” The latter expression is a much more effective descriptor.

Norming Rubrics

Norming is a collaborative decision-making process that ensures consistent scoring across student work. The goal of norming is to come to consensus about how the different levels on a rubric should be applied.

Brief Overview of the Process:

1. Review the rubric

2. Read the sample assignment

3. Score the sample

4. Discuss scores with colleagues

5. Find consensus

For more information: Quick Guide to Norming

Using Rubrics for Grades

Converting rubric scores to grades requires some careful thought and planning. There are two challenges to converting rubric scores to grades. First, there are times when instructors prefer that each criterion be weighed differently. Second, often times the performance levels on a rubric do not align to the point percentages students must earn for letter grades. The flexibility and adaptability of rubrics allow for creative solutions to these challenges. What follows are a few examples of how to address them.

Weighing the Criteria

Sometimes instructors do not want each criterion to count for the same portion of a student’s overall grade. The simplest method to overcome this challenge is to include a multiplier for each criterion (see Sample 7). More important criteria should be given weight that represents their relative importance to the task. In the sample below, “Historical Accuracy” counts as 60 percent of the students overall grade, while “Organization” and “Bibliography” count as 20 percent each. To score the rubric, the instructor would multiply the performance level by the multiplier for each criterion.

Aligning Performance Levels to Grades

Converting rubric results to letter grades can be difficult because the point values of performance levels do not align to the intended letter grade equivalent. It is generally not a good idea to think of rubrics in terms of percentages. For example, in the sample above, “Adequate” may be intended to equate to a “C” letter grade. If the instructor adds up the points earned and divides it by the total possible, however, a student who receives an “Adequate” for all the criteria would receive a 50 percent (which is an “F” in the most common grading scales). There are two primary methods for overcoming this challenge. The first method is to simply modify the point values of each performance level so they align to their intended corresponding letter grades. For example, a rubric with five performance levels such as Sample 5 could use 10, 9, 8, 7, and 6 rather than 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. The second method is to create a conversion table that articulates the equivalencies between rubric scores and grades (see Sample 8).

Note: It is important to remember that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges. Instructors should use what works for them and what fits comfortably into their individual grading system. If you would like assistance creating rubrics or converting rubric scores into letter grades, feel free to contact the Assessment Coordinator.

Supplemental Materials

Video: A Practical Guide to Assessment - Module 2d: Rubric Design and PPT
Article: Rubrics As A Way Of Providing Transparency In Assessment
Article: Rubrics – Sharing The Rules Of The Game
Video: Using Rubrics for Assessment
Video: Let’s Get Ready to Rubric
Rubric Generators: RCampus and Rubistar
Website: Creating and Using Rubrics

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License.

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