Students really benefit from having instructors share explicit evaluation criteria along with assignment instructions. For students, having rubrics not only demystifies how their work will be evaluated but also teaches what makes for a successful paper in response to that assignment, in that genre, and in that discipline. As an instructor, you can also benefit from creating rubrics—they can help you clarify your priorities for student writing and can help you be more efficient and consistent as you evaluate students’ work.
Although rubrics are beneficial, on their own they do not constitute all the feedback that students need and deserve on substantial written work. Students need some individually tailored feedback; they need us to engage with their original thinking, ideas, or arguments. How you weight the criteria on your rubric should demonstrate that you value these aspects of their writing.
Remember too that the characteristics of successful papers articulated in a rubric seem to offer clarity and precision, but the truth is that all of the significant terms in evaluation criteria and rubrics require further explanation and interpretation. So we shouldn’t expect rubrics to answer every question or solve all of the challenges we face in communicating with our students about our expectations.
For more ideas on building rubrics, check out the WAC program’s resource, How to Build and Use Rubrics Effectively.
To learn how to add a rubric to an assignment in Canvas, check out this resource.
To learn how to import a pre-made rubric into Canvas, check out this resource.
Adapted from John Bean, Engaging Ideas : The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.
An analytic rubric gives separate scores for each criterion (e.g. organization, argument, clarity, etc.). When writing an analytic rubric, be intentional about how you weigh some criteria more heavily than others. The weights should be in alignment with the learning goals of the assignment or of your course.
Combined with feedback, an analytic rubric can convey highly detailed information to students about performance in different criteria.
Sample Analytic Rubrics:
A holistic rubric gives one score that reflects an overall impression of the students’ performance. This rubric can be used to frame writing as a performance that integrates ideas, structure, syntax, grammar into a singular score. While seemingly more subjective, this rubric style nonetheless better represents how writing is greater than the sum of its parts.
This style of rubric can be more time-efficient in providing feedback to students’ overall performance.
Sample Holistic Rubrics:
Adapted from John Bean, Engaging Ideas : The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.
Inflexible use of rubrics can lead to less natural ways of reading for the same of applying strict evaluative criteria. The message sent to students in this instance is that there are universally agreed-upon standards for good writing, when in fact these standards are temporarily forged for the assignment. This can devalue non-dominant linguistic practices that can be central to students’ identities.
Using one rubric to evaluate different writing tasks can mask the variety of different reading practices produced by different disciplinary expectations and genres.
Especially with rubrics designed in grids, the apparent precision of adjudicating one score over another creates a false sense of objectivity about “good” writing.