Rubrics - what are they really for?

[Hibush]

If the descriptors are well written, the rubric would actually be effective for detecting this ruse. But enjoyment is enjoyment, so there's no second guessing that.

Well, if I actually enjoy reading a student's paper, it is going to get an A...

I wish you nothing but A papers for the rest of the semester!

[marshwiggle]

For me, the more artificial the assignment, the more useful it is  to have a rubric. I know what I'm looking for in a paper and I don't really like trying to break it down into a bunch of different elements.

Good point that the rubric is easier the more artificial or skill-focused the assignment. Good writing may be like good wine when it comes to evaluation. In wine tasting, with the better stuff, the rubric has things like complexity, balance, trueness to historic style, and coherence. With practice, those are easily scorable, but do the explanations make sense to someone trying to learn to do better?

Does a rubric also have the result, like wine, that if you put cheap stuff in expensive bottles it fools the supposed "experts" looking for esoteric stuff like "complexity, balance, trueness to historic style, and coherence"?

If the descriptors are well written, the rubric would actually be effective for detecting this ruse. But enjoyment is enjoyment, so there's no second guessing that.

Well, if I actually enjoy reading a student's paper, it is going to get an A...

I think the issue is that there are two parts to evaluation; preventing bad practices and encouraging good practices. It's easier to be more specific with rubrics, checklists, etc. to do the former and harder to do the latter. For most students, they need more of the former than the latter, (unless you have a very selective group of students).

So for most students, very specific items about what to avoid will be useful. (I'd say for most students to get them up to something like "B" range.) For the good students, who will pretty naturally avoid those mistakes in the first place, they will be more able to benefit from the more open-ended but hard to define feedback about how to identify/produce excellence. (These are the "A" range students.)

I don't know that there's an easy way to have one tool that will do well at both.