Using Scoring Rubrics
Using Scoring Rubrics
Scoring rubrics are explicit schemes for classifying products or behaviors into categories that
vary along a continuum. They can be used to classify virtually any product or behavior, such as
essays, research reports, portfolios, works of art, recitals, oral presentations, performances, and
group activities. Judgments can be self-assessments by students; or judgments can be made by
others, such as faculty, other students, fieldwork supervisors, and external reviewers. Rubrics can
be used to provide formative feedback to students, to grade students, and/or to assess programs.
Suggestions for Using Scoring Rubrics for Grading and Program Assessment
1. Hand out the grading rubric with an assignment so students will know your expectations and
how they'll be graded. This should help students master your learning objectives by guiding
their work in appropriate directions.
2. Use a rubric for grading student work, including essay questions on exams, and return the
rubric with the grading on it. Faculty save time writing extensive comments; they just circle
or highlight relevant segments of the rubric. Each row in the rubric could have a different
array of possible points, reflecting its relative importance for determining the overall grade.
Points (or point ranges) possible for each cell in the rubric could be printed on the rubric, and
a column for points for each row and comments section(s) could be added.
3. Develop a rubric with your students for an assignment or group project. Students can then
monitor themselves and their peers using agreed-upon criteria that they helped develop.
(Many faculty find that students will create higher standards for themselves than faculty
would impose on them.)
4. Have students apply your rubric to some sample products (e.g., lab reports) before they
create their own. Faculty report that students are quite accurate when doing this, and this
process should help them evaluate their own products as they develop them.
5. Have students exchange paper drafts and give peer feedback using the rubric, then give
students a few days before the final drafts are turned in to you. (You might also require that
they turn in the draft and scored rubric with their final paper.)
6. Have students self-assess their products using the grading rubric and hand in the self-
assessment with the product; then faculty and students can compare self- and faculty-
generated evaluations.
7. Use the rubric for program assessment. Faculty can use it in classes and aggregate the data
across sections, faculty can independently assess student products (e.g., portfolios) and then
aggregate the data, or faculty can participate in group readings in which they review student
products together and discuss what they found. Field work supervisors or community
professionals also may be invited to assess student work using rubrics. A well-designed
rubric should allow evaluators to efficiently focus on specific learning objectives while
reviewing complex student products, such as theses, without getting bogged down in the
details. Rubrics should be pilot tested, and evaluators should be “normed” before they apply
the rubrics (i.e., they should agree on appropriate classifications for a set of student products
that vary in quality). If two evaluators apply the rubric to each product, inter-rater reliability
can be examined. Once the data are collected, faculty discuss results to identify program
strengths and areas of concern, “closing the loop” by using the assessment data to make
changes to improve student learning.
8. Faculty can get “double duty” out of their grading by using a common rubric that is used for
grading and program assessment. Individual faculty may elect to use the common rubric in
different ways, combining it with other grading components as they see fit.