Rubrics are a great way to help guide and evaluate students. When asking students to complete large assignments such as a written paper or team project, rubrics can allow students to clearly understand your expectations as an educator. To help guide individuals in creating meaningful rubrics for their courses, two of my colleagues and I have developed this simple framework for evaluating your rubrics. This is a high-level overview of the framework, but we’ll be releasing a more detailed version in the near future. Please know that this is very new, so feedback is both welcome and appreciated.
SOLID Rubrics
The SOLID acronym is intended to support the creation and evaluation of rubrics within academic settings. This method should be applied to a rubric in a holistic evaluation process as opposed to evaluating individual statements within the rubric itself. This method is not designed to be a linear process. Individuals can choose to work through each category in any order.
Suitable:
A suitable rubric strongly aligns with the assignment. It ensures the proper ‘fit’ or congruence between the assigned work and the evaluation metric. It includes vital elements relating to student learning while ensuring flexibility for graders.
- Fit/Congruence – The rubric used is the best option for effectively evaluating the assigned work at the appropriate level.
- Would a different rubric better evaluate the student work for this assignment?
- Flexibility – Allows flexibility (cannot be subjective) of grading from the criteria, descriptor, and grading perspectives.
- Does this rubric allow a grader to identify or communicate areas for improvement, without being subjective?
Objective:
Rubrics are objective in their design. Objective rubrics demonstrate clear levels of mastery that will allow multiple reviewers to grade submitted work with a high degree of consistency. Grading becomes more impartial because subjectivity, however unintended, has been removed. All components of the rubric are easily understood by students, faculty, and graders/TAs, leaving no room for misinterpretation.
- Consistency in Grading (Reliability) – For large enrolling classes, graders/TAs can provide evaluation with some degree of relative consistency – achievement levels should resemble one another if multiple graders are involved in the grading process.
- Can this rubric be used to grade a variety of submissions with a consistent degree of feedback while accommodating personal style to be expressed by the students?
- Levels of achievement are clearly defined – Discriminating levels of quality within a range
- Does this rubric outline the criteria and descriptor requirements to enable students to achieve mastery of the assigned task?
- Avoids unintended bias – Objective rubrics are free of cultural, gender, age, etc. generalizations that may allow unintended bias to influence the grading outcome.
- Is this rubric free of generalizations and unintended bias?
Learner-focused:
Learner-focused rubrics explicitly communicate faculty expectations for what they want students to demonstrate (how students can demonstrate their KSAs).
- Vital Elements (validity)- The rubric actually measures the specific tasks or skills that students are to be demonstrating in the assignment. Does not include items that are questionable or inconsequential.
- Is the rubric focused on evaluating the key learning elements rather than evaluating any item simply because it could be evaluated?
- Point Values – whatever the students need to be able to do is what should be most heavily weighted.
- Does the point distribution accurately represent the value associated with each task?
- Objective-Driven – Consistent with Learning Objectives, Focuses on Learning Objectives rather than the Mechanics. Evaluating the students’ ability to demonstrate what they have learned as it relates to the course objectives.
- Do the tasks in the rubric align with the learning objectives associated with this assignment?
- Self-Assessment – A student should be able to use the rubric as a pre-evaluation tool. They can use this to improve the quality of the work. (focus on what students need to be able to do rather than one that dictates how a faculty member will grade the rubric.
- Can a student effectively use this rubric to self-evaluate and correct their own work for a higher quality of demonstrated work?
Intuitive:
An intuitive rubric is designed to be accessible and easy to use. It should be obvious how to distinguish between options in order to effectively evaluate student work. Students and graders can use the rubric to grade. (More for the person using the rubric)
- Easy to Use – Anyone responsible for grading the assignment should be able to use the specific rubric effectively; it should not require additional explanations, context, or instructions.
- Can students and graders understand and apply this rubric?
- Obvious – Information specified in the rubric is clear and easily understood. Multiple users will be able to extract similar meaning from the language used.
- Can another individual use this rubric to grade an assignment with similar results?
- Accessible – The language and writing style of the criteria and descriptors are more conversational. It provides easily understood descriptions of the instructor’s expectations.
- Does the rubric use approachable language that is easily understood by students and graders?
Descriptive:
A descriptive rubric clearly defines measurable tasks which make up the structure of the rubric. The rubric is informative, concise, and free of jargon.
- Detailed -The tasks/requirements are well-defined and include a sufficient degree of detail to ensure clearly communicated expectations. Doesn’t overburden students’ abilities to understand required tasks.
- Are important pieces of information missing from this rubric?
- Does this rubric include too much information?
- Concise – The statements are clear, to the point, and use language that effectively articulates the intent of each task.
- Are the descriptors written in clear statements that are free of jargon?
- Informative – All descriptors utilize active statements that provide information that students need to be able to complete the task. The content provided is meaningful to the students.
- Is the content in the rubric meaningful to students and graders/TAs?