How to Create a Helpful Rubric
Most teachers (definitely most English teachers) would agree that grading is one of the worst parts of our job. It starts off okay: we created a new assignment, we want to see how students did, and we have that new pack of colored gel pens waiting. But it quickly becomes a slog: our amazing lesson plan wasn’t the magic bullet that made our students great writers, we have 100 versions of the same superficial response to read, and mountains of papers (actual or virtual) loom over us, threatening to ruin yet another weekend. While our podcast episode “Grading Papers: Help Managing Your Grading Load” and our YouTube video “Tips for Teachers: Keeping Up With Grading” are both full of strategies we’ve found helpful, we wanted to focus here on how to craft a truly helpful rubric.
Rubrics are a lifesaver when it comes to managing the grading load. Most English teachers are no stranger to rubrics—it’s how most of us grade essays—but in order to cut grading time and try to promote consistency within our PLC, we started using them for just about everything. A good rubric not only helps keep your grading objective and consistent, it allows you to provide some sort of feedback to students without spending hours handwriting individualized comments in the margins. As with rubrics you use to score essays, the more familiar you get with a rubric, the faster you are at using it. And, for those of us transitioning from paper and pencil to mostly digital, most Learning Management Systems make it pretty easy to attach a rubric to any assignment.
Crafting a rubric that meets your needs is a skill that requires practice, and it’s something we’ve definitely improved on as we’ve begun to rely on them for more than just writing assignments.
Here are some of our top tips for making a rubric that makes your life easier:
Don’t start from scratch.
The Internet is full of rubrics. You may even have multiple rubrics you created or inherited floating around your literal and digital file cabinets already. Creating a rubric from scratch is tough, and it’s rarely necessary. Find a rubric you at least sort of like and edit it to meet your needs. As you begin developing rubrics to suit particular assignment types, you’ll have a set of variations you can use as templates when you need a new one.
Come up with your categories first.
What do you want to make sure you evaluate as you look at student work? For writing assignments, we generally include lines for a claim, evidence, argument, academic language, and grammar/mechanics. If it’s a unique assignment like a business letter, we’ll add another line for formatting. If we really hammered students on the importance of the correct use of quotations, we’ll separate the selection of evidence from integration, punctuation, and citation. If the assignment had specific directions like including a summary paragraph at the beginning, we’ll add a line for that. For homework assignments and projects, we generally include lines for Required Content, Understanding of Topic/Text, Quality/Effort, and Grammar/Mechanics, though there is certainly some variation.
Differentiate your score points.
We like to work on one category at a time so that we’re making sure we clearly differentiate between what makes work “Excellent,” “Satisfactory,” “Needs Improvement,” and “Unacceptable/Missing.” We start with “Excellent” and try to describe everything we would like to see when it comes to that category, using descriptors like persuasive, reasonable, meaningful, insightful, thorough, strong. Then, working from that first description, we decide what could be missing from that and still count as “Satisfactory,” replacing the “Excellent” descriptors with ones like acceptable, plausible, superficial, some. We tend to write our rubrics so that both “Excellent” and “Satisfactory” do everything they were supposed to do, but students who score “Excellent” have put more time and thought into developing their ideas. In our “Needs Improvement” category, we’ll modify the description to address errors and omissions that prevent the work from meeting the standards for the assignment, using descriptors like implausible, inaccurate, inadequate, limited, minimal. For the “Unacceptable/Missing” category, we determine what merits no credit in that category, whether it is missing or so inaccurate as to misrepresent the text.
Run the math.
Fill out the rubric for a few scenarios and see if the final scores match up with what you think an “Excellent,” “Satisfactory,” or “Needs Improvement” should earn. Sometimes, the descriptors on your rubric unintentionally make it impossible for a pretty good project with one shortcoming to earn an A. More often than not, the points students can earn for following directions or formatting outweigh the points for quality and scores are inflated. If you’re not happy with the results, adjust the point values so that the quality of the writing weighs higher than the points for following directions. It’s much better to figure this out while you’re still in “construction mode” than after you’ve graded a handful of projects.
Make notes as you grade.
It’s unlikely you’ll craft the perfect rubric the first time around. Keep a blank copy nearby while you grade, and write down common mistakes students make that you didn’t anticipate or that don’t fit neatly into the descriptors you wrote. Edit your phrasing. Make a note to add a line for a criterion you didn’t think of that is now jumping out at you. Adjust the scoring. It may not help for this particular assignment, but you can make the edits for your next assignment and for future years, and after a few times through, you’ll have a rubric you really like that addresses the issues you see most often and care most about.
What issues do you have when you’re creating a rubric? What strategies have you found helpful in the process? Connect with us at hello@threeheads.works or on Instagram @threeheads.works. Share this blog post with your colleagues and make creating a shared rubric the project for your next PLC meeting: as always, Three Heads is confident that collaboration makes for the best final result!