Rubrics - what are they really for?

[mamselle]

I've never taught anything where rubrics applied--when I was teaching art and architecture history, rubrics were just a gleam in some assessor's eye, and French I classes are just getting at the basics, so the mini-essays they worked on were really more recycled phrases from their grammar studies than anything analyzable (is that a word?)

Music students get a run-down from my notes as they play, which might be like a set of rubrics, except they're so specific they'd be hard to codify, past "Crescendo here," "Don't ignore staccato markings here," etc.

When I played for contests, long ago, I suppose the practice notes I made for myself could have been a kind of rubric; I was also interested to know that the "Tiger Mom" book showed her doing something similar for her kids' lessons--but the kids should have been encouraged to do it on their own (the whole problem with that scene was the mom inserting herself into every single process of the kid's performance practice...)

However, I worked with an editor once who liked using rubrics for his clients because he found it cut down a lot on his work: within 5 pages he'd identified my "fautes favorites" and then just put in page references wherever they recurred.

I had mixed responses to its usefulness for myself; if he'd also circled the item on the page, it might have been more helpful; as it was, I'd start skimming the page for the error, find two or three possible issues, but not be sure which they were targeting.

So, to make them useful, I think you still have to mark the specific items, either using the point-numbers-as-key system (which I like, that's very economical and almost poetic!) or just circling/highlighting the item (or use track changes).

Rubrics mostly save on writing out phrases over and over to give feedback. I used to have macros (back before it was unsafe to use macros) for various comments, tied to appropriate keystrokes; now for editorial proofreading I use .pdfs and type in messages instead.

But overall, I think if you're being required to use them, you might as well start using them instead of trying to get ammo by which to mount a push-back campaign against them (which is what, from the sense I get of the OP, it sounds like this thread is really meant to do.)

It's not a huge, high learning curve, and once it's set up, you just tweak it for various contexts.

M.

ETA: OK, reading Aster's point, made just before I posted, I see that side of it as well, but the OP is an adjunct, right? So, you also have to decide if this is a hill you want to die on.

Do something rudimentary, if that makes more sense in your setting (we also don't actually know what you're teaching, so that's another consideration), and use it effectively, and move on. Don't build up a head of steam and get geared up to change the world.

Actually, if there's such a revolving door on the admin offices as you describe, that person may well be gone before the directive can be applied.

So, think it through logically, do something simple but effective, be able to point out all its good points, and bake a holiday pie or something.

Or cake, if that's your druthers....oh, by the way, do we have a "cake and pie" thread?...

M. 

[downer]

It is true that I don't react well to admins telling me how to teach. But I guess that's just me, and everyone else loves it.

What I will probably do is take what I already have in my oourses as guidelines for students, and count them as rubrics. And I will put something entirely vague in the LMS rubric machine.

Then I will publicly atone for my crimes when necessary and I will wait for my re-education.

I have taken the same minimally cooperative attitude towards most of their directives (prescribed format of online classes, making my materials accessible, addressing the stated learning outcomes, etc) and there's never any real follow through. They keep on hiring me, almost to my disappointment.

[Hibush]

It is true that I don't react well to admins telling me how to teach. But I guess that's just me, and everyone else loves it.

What I will probably do is take what I already have in my oourses as guidelines for students, and count them as rubrics. And I will put something entirely vague in the LMS rubric machine.

Then I will publicly atone for my crimes when necessary and I will wait for my re-education.

I have taken the same minimally cooperative attitude towards most of their directives (prescribed format of online classes, making my materials accessible, addressing the stated learning outcomes, etc) and there's never any real follow through. They keep on hiring me, almost to my disappointment.

This seems like a reasonable approach given the whole situation.   

I would not go to much effort if the risk of consequences were so low and the benefits hard to find. My use leads to decisions that I believe to be sounder, which is the big payoff. The accountability is to peer faculty, especially those who got the short end of some decision and would have done it differently. The personal benefit is pretty high for that consequence as well.

[Anon1787]

It is true that I don't react well to admins telling me how to teach. But I guess that's just me, and everyone else loves it.

What I will probably do is take what I already have in my oourses as guidelines for students, and count them as rubrics. And I will put something entirely vague in the LMS rubric machine.

Then I will publicly atone for my crimes when necessary and I will wait for my re-education.

I have taken the same minimally cooperative attitude towards most of their directives (prescribed format of online classes, making my materials accessible, addressing the stated learning outcomes, etc) and there's never any real follow through. They keep on hiring me, almost to my disappointment.

It seems to reflect the increasing check-the-box bureaucratization of higher education that is making it more like K-12.

[the_geneticist]

It is true that I don't react well to admins telling me how to teach. But I guess that's just me, and everyone else loves it.

What I will probably do is take what I already have in my oourses as guidelines for students, and count them as rubrics. And I will put something entirely vague in the LMS rubric machine.

Then I will publicly atone for my crimes when necessary and I will wait for my re-education.

I have taken the same minimally cooperative attitude towards most of their directives (prescribed format of online classes, making my materials accessible, addressing the stated learning outcomes, etc) and there's never any real follow through. They keep on hiring me, almost to my disappointment.

I don't love it either.  It's really annoying when we get a stern "You MUST include X in your syllabus" email.  The majority of the time is something that's already in there (learning goals, dates for major assignments, my contact information, etc.).
Or the cycling of trendy things like "go paperless!" "use clickers!"  Those are the sort of thing you can nod & smile at and ignore.  Or ask pointed questions about cost, training, and accessibility.

[AmLitHist]

I have no love for Admin's micromanagement either.  However, I don't necessarily understand the problem with rubrics in general. 

Presumably you already have a list (either written or in mind) when you grade. The rubric just puts that in writing, lets students know your expectations, and so on.  When I grade essays,  I'm looking for things like whether the paper meets the assignment--yes or no, and to what degree?  Is there a clear and effective thesis--yes or no, and to what degree?  and so on.

A rubric allows me to weight the value of each category of skill I'm grading (the thesis might be worth 10%, the supporting evidence worth 20%, grammar and mechanics worth 15%, and so on) and to break each of those criteria into levels of accomplishment (lack of a clear thesis earns 0, an incomplete or unclear thesis gets 4%, a pretty good thesis earns 7%, an excellent one earns 10%--and I define what each of those levels looks like).  My rubric lists every category of things I'm looking for, to come to 100%, then gives me a checklist of how well the paper achieves those things.  And it makes grading a lot faster and lets me cut down on the end-of-paper commentary I have to write.  In a lot of ways, it makes that written feedback more positive:  I can praise what's done well, ask questions to help coach the student for future work (e.g., "Your refutation says X--might that not also be a good supporting point that could then lead into the actual refutation?"), and let the more problematic areas get addressed by the stock comments in that rubric (e.g., "Thesis hooks the reader but doesn't forecast organization of support").

I make a separate rubric for each paper, because while I'm considering the same things in each one, I usually want to weight those criteria differently.  So, while I always look for a clear thesis/claim, I might weight that more heavily in an early paper, when they're first trying to master the basics of argument.  On a later researched argument, I'm going to weight their refutation of the opposing point more heavily, because they've had more time and work on that skill.  And having a specific weighted rubric for each of the 4-5 papers in a class lets me tailor things like whether or not outside sources are required, the related need for documentation, etc.

Just my take on rubrics--I came to them late and wished I'd adopted them much earlier in my career.

[nonsensical]

I use rubrics that break down the components of an assignment and assign a point value to each component. I also share those rubrics with students in advance so that they can see what they should be paying attention to and how important each part is relative to each other part. For instance, one rubric might have 20 possible points for writing a good thesis statement and 10 possible points for grammar. That tells students that they should pay attention to both but that the thesis statement is more important.

[pepsi_alum]

I like well-designed rubrics in that they help to speed up grading of assignments and tend to minimize complaints that I get from students about the grading process. I've never heard of being required to put them in a syllabus and find that little odd, but if told to, I could do it without much fuss given the rubrics that I've developed .

That having been said, rubrics can be used or good or bad purposes depending on circumstances and one's intentions. There was a case of "Asessment Gone Wild" at my last job that left a really bitter taste in my mouth. A lecturer who wasn't very goood at their job (who received very weak student evaluations, had frequent student complaints to the chair, and was rumored to have a few other personnel file things going on) figured out that they could earn favor with the powers-that-be by hitching themselves to the assessment wagon. They went to some fancy conference/workshop on assessment and came back with ideas that were just bizarre. Examples include: using a 6-page rubric to assess a 4-page student paper, insisting that every asisngment in a class (including attendance and participation) had to be assessed with a rubirc, insisting that every rubiic had to correspond to 1 or more course learning outcomes, and that if it didn't correspond to a learning outcome, it meant the assignment had to be eliminated because it wasn't fulfilling course learning outcomes. Their teaching did not really improve; the basic student complaint was that the class was more about their ability to follow bizzarely specific rubrics/handouts than it did their understanding of course readings or materials.

[marshwiggle]

That having been said, rubrics can be used or good or bad purposes depending on circumstances and one's intentions. There was a case of "Asessment Gone Wild" at my last job that left a really bitter taste in my mouth. A lecturer who wasn't very goood at their job (who received very weak student evaluations, had frequent student complaints to the chair, and was rumored to have a few other personnel file things going on) figured out that they could earn favor with the powers-that-be by hitching themselves to the assessment wagon. They went to some fancy conference/workshop on assessment and came back with ideas that were just bizarre. Examples include: using a 6-page rubric to assess a 4-page student paper, insisting that every asisngment in a class (including attendance and participation) had to be assessed with a rubirc, insisting that every rubiic had to correspond to 1 or more course learning outcomes, and that if it didn't correspond to a learning outcome, it meant the assignment had to be eliminated because it wasn't fulfilling course learning outcomes. Their teaching did not really improve; the basic student complaint was that the class was more about their ability to follow bizzarely specific rubrics/handouts than it did their understanding of course readings or materials.

This sounds like someone destined for the public service. What government department wouldn't salivate at the chance to get someone that committed to the cause?

[Kron3007]

I think it is quite reasonable for students to know how they will be evaluated before submitting their assignments, which requires a rubric of some sort.  I also think it is important to have a clear rubric if assignments will be graded by multiple people for consistency and equity.  Personally, I like the rubric for grading as it breaks it down into bite sized pieces and helps explain the final grade for students.  I usually send them back a spreadsheet version of the rubric that includes a comment section so I can comment on the specific aspects of the assignment.  Overall, I find that rubrics make my life easier, students like to know how they were assessed, and it helps TAs do their job.

I dont like having to include them in the outline, and feel this is a little overboard.  In my outline, I also have to link each assignment to specific learning objectives, which I also dont really like, but that is what needs to be done I guess. 

[downer]

This is a useful conversation which helps me think about rubrics. I would note that the school in question seems to have no interest in fostering a conversation about rubrics. I just wants to please Middle States. Or to be even more cynical, administrators want to be seen to be making an effort to please Middle States, so that their jobs are more secure.

It does seem that rubrics should be useful. It also seems that outcomes assessment should be useful. It is an open question whether they are actually useful. Presumably, most of us received educations that involved neither of these innovations. Maybe smarter students have less need of rubrics -- maybe they are more useful to students who can't work it out for themselves. I don't know. It could be that spoon-feeding the students impairs the learning process.

One big question for me is still what a rubric is meant to do. One some accounts, it is non-directive, just stating some standards that will help students assess they are heading in the right direction. On others, the rubric is an algorithm for calculating the grade.

For complex assignments, such as writing a long paper, i am dubious whether there could be an algorithm for calculating the grade. There are various indicators of what grade a paper deserves, but it's partly a matter of judgment that resists a mechanical analysis.

But these days I rarely assign long papers, nor even just regular papers. I tend to assign structured papers, where I prescribe in a mechanical way what the different sections should be. Especially for my community college students. Having already broken down the task to small bits, I'm not sure whether I could spell out what it takes to do those bits excellently, well, or adequately. It seems pretty self-evident. E.g "Summarize the main claim of the author." I'm tempted to say that students either get it or they don't. I've already made the whole task a set of pretty simple sub-tasks and the question is whether students do them.

As I mentioned previously, I almost never get any student complaints about the grading process, so I have no need of reducing complaints.

[the_geneticist]

I like well-designed rubrics in that they help to speed up grading of assignments and tend to minimize complaints that I get from students about the grading process. I've never heard of being required to put them in a syllabus and find that little odd, but if told to, I could do it without much fuss given the rubrics that I've developed .

That having been said, rubrics can be used or good or bad purposes depending on circumstances and one's intentions. There was a case of "Asessment Gone Wild" at my last job that left a really bitter taste in my mouth. A lecturer who wasn't very goood at their job (who received very weak student evaluations, had frequent student complaints to the chair, and was rumored to have a few other personnel file things going on) figured out that they could earn favor with the powers-that-be by hitching themselves to the assessment wagon. They went to some fancy conference/workshop on assessment and came back with ideas that were just bizarre. Examples include: using a 6-page rubric to assess a 4-page student paper, insisting that every asisngment in a class (including attendance and participation) had to be assessed with a rubirc, insisting that every rubiic had to correspond to 1 or more course learning outcomes, and that if it didn't correspond to a learning outcome, it meant the assignment had to be eliminated because it wasn't fulfilling course learning outcomes. Their teaching did not really improve; the basic student complaint was that the class was more about their ability to follow bizzarely specific rubrics/handouts than it did their understanding of course readings or materials.

Oh dear god!  Talk about a paradoxical result of the rubric training - it made things worse!

[Aster]

Rubrics are useful. Except when they're not.

Formal placement of items onto a syllabus can be useful. Except when it isn't.

High quality assessment is directly correlated to faculty choice in how each professor chooses to operate his/her individual assessment strategies. There is no best way to assess. There is no optimal way to populate a syllabus.

[Hibush]

Oh dear god!  Talk about a paradoxical result of the rubric training - it made things worse!

Surely one could develop an effective rubric for assessing the assessment process!

[San Joaquin]

Um, yes.  If you want to do it well and maybe adjust over time.