Rubrics

Our more seasoned teachers are grading wizards. After ten, fifteen, twenty years of marking, they can look at a piece of paper and give you a letter grade in ninety seconds. They can feel it out. The force is with them.

Twenty years ago, teachers were the kings and queens of their own islands after all. We graded according to our consciences and set standards independently for each of our classrooms. Teacher A at the end of hallway C could be a hard-nosed, foot-to-the-fire instructor while Teacher B at the end of hallway D could be party-time Patrick.

It is not so anymore. Not only must we all grade according to common standards; we must also be able to justify every single grade we give. Parents and students know this. At any given moment, a child--one of our beautiful, innocent lights of the future--could walk up to you and say: "You need to grade this over because I KNOW I didn't just get a D."

Depending on the area you work in and the disciplinary structure of your school, you might even get a few cuss words with the request.

So how can we save ourselves some of the headache that accompanies grading disputes?

Rubrics are the way.

Here's a brief summary of what a rubric is and why it is used. 

A rubric is a scoring tool that is often a table. It can be either landscape or portrait. One axis is labeled with scoring criteria. For example, you might score a speech according to poise, vocal quality, content and grammar. The other axis is labeled with point values (numerical or quality). If your best speech is a "4," score possibilities might be 4, 3, 2, 1 or 0.

The inner boxes of the grid provide characteristics of what a great, good, average or poor piece of work contain. Feel free to pull up ANY example of this table style of rubric via google.

Here's an example of the table style rubric that I created--for free--at Rubistar.

There are also prose style rubrics (my particular favorite) which simply give characteristics and ascribe points to each one. These may look like a bulleted list.

Here's one of my prose style rubrics that I like to use for grading older students' book reports.

Here is why rubric-use makes your teacher life easier. 

First, you can use standard rubrics that have already been designed to grade your assignment types. There are already hundreds of rubrics designed to score essays, speeches, presentations of many kinds, etc. If you find one that fits your marking style, you can simply adopt it and credit the writer.

Second, you can alter an existing rubric to fit your grading needs. I know you already have a list of favorite assessment types, formative and summative. Just adopt and adapt rubrics that you can use--over and over--to mark the work. If you ever decide you need to lighten up or buckle down in certain areas, you just change the point values a little.

Third, you can write or create your own rubric. You don't have to do this, but you might like it. Rubistar is an excellent resource for creating your own rubric since they have preloaded criteria and descriptions you can use to make your own table style rubric. In just a few moments, you have a professional quality marking tool that can be copied (on half sheets) and distributed to students prior to assigning tasks.

You can also write the prose style rubric (like the book report one linked above). Just bear in mind that the prose style rubric is an "all or nothing" mastery driven tool. If you're a more sympathetic marker, you might prefer the table style which is holistic and more like a sliding scale.

Depending on the students' ages, you might only need to distribute one copy of each kind of rubric and place point values on the actual marked papers. That will save you copy time, cost and resources.

Don't just take my word for it. Try ONE rubric for yourself. Then, when Suzie or Sammy comes up to ask why you GAVE HIM a C, you can run down the point values and provide actual descriptions for how you scored each required element.

Chalkboards and Shenanigans,

-Ms. Moss