A colleague brought a rubric from one of her courses into my office and asked me to take a look at it. Aside from the fact it was missing significant detail to serve as a meaningful tool for students, the grading scheme would have ensured the slightest mistake would result in a failing grade for the student. Surprisingly, this is something I’ve run into a number of times over the past few years. So, I created this post to help others in their rubric creation process. In it, I outline several key points of consideration when developing grading schemas for your rubrics. Best of luck!
Sketch out the descriptors and criteria
Before we can dive into the details of point values, there are a few basics we need to cover first. The rubric needs to be well designed and provide meaningful feedback to students. If you’re not familiar with the SOLID rubric framework my colleagues and I developed, you can read about it on one of my former posts. In the meantime, here are two key tips to make sure the rubric you are creating is valuable to students.
- There is significant detail included for each descriptor. This needs to go beyond “This is excellent work” to provide the details of why it is classified as exemplary.
- The rubric does not evaluate the mechanics of the assignment (i.e. ability to follow instructions – submitting the paper, formatting it properly, naming it with a specific convention, etc.) None of these relate to actual learning, so they are not valuable to the students.
*For a more detailed explanation on rubric design, please read my post on the SOLID framework.
Establish the highest and lowest values
When establishing a grading schema for your assignments, you need to start by identifying two main thresholds, the highest point value and the lowest point value. The highest point value is pretty straight forward, an example would be a paper worth 100 points. However, establishing the lowest threshold is a different story. The mistake I see people most often make is to attribute ones or zeros to each descriptor in the ‘failing category’. Here’s the issue with doing this. You don’t actually want students to receive a zero for their work. No matter how much refinement an assignment might need, the student still put effort into the assignment and it still has value.
To identify the lowest value threshold, determine what a failing grade would be – is it a 50? a 60? Then distribute the points across the descriptors for the ‘failing’ (although it’s a much better strategy to use positive terms such as ’novice’) category. This means that if a student’s submission falls short on every category, they are still receiving a minimum point value for their work instead of a zero. Once the lowest threshold has been established, you can begin to identify and balance the mid-level point values for each descriptor.
As a bonus tip – Consider using ranges in your rubrics. They provide you with flexibility when grading that single numbers do not. If the gaps are clear between the criteria, this provides you with the ability for students to understand how much progress they need to make in a given area until they can achieve the next highest level.