Rubrics - what are they really for?

[dr_codex]

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.

Hey! That's my colleague! Kind of reassuring to know that s/he isn't the only one.

**

OP, if they make you design rubrics, you are also in control of what's in them.

I have friends who include categories such as "Includes something that surprised me!" and "Taught me something that I didn't already know about the topic!". These won't work for everybody, on every assignment, but they can illustrate what you really value in academic writing, and what you really hope to provoke. One of my friends says that on some assignments, "Tell me something that I don't know" earns an immediate "A". (I assume that there are other parameters in place that condition what counts.)

You can be bold with these.

If they wind up causing more trouble than they are worth, you change them, and say that it's a data-driven decision, and that you are moving forward along the Assessment Spiral.

Honestly, though, it can be a pain to set these up, but the save a ton of time in grading if you are doing anything at scale. I also wish that I'd gotten on board earlier.

[teach_write_research]

I'm a fan of rubrics for grading efficiency and consistency and for guiding students. Though in the syllabus? Students will gain little from seeing a decontextualized rubric in a syllabus.

I suspect Polly_Mer has it right - that's totally an institutional information and documentation management decision. But here's what you could do. If you have papers or projects or what-have-you, define the broad standards for work that is "passing", "meets standards", and "exceeds standards" - align those with A-D grades and that might be a sufficient example rubric.

Also, double triple check that whoever sent out that instruction didn't actually mean student learning outcomes which, while related to rubrics and grading, are not assignment rubrics. Unless you have one graded assignment that defines the entire course grade then rubric = student learning outcome = grade :-)

I'm told that my syllabus for next semester needs to include rubrics, because of Middle States requirements.

The institution needs to demonstrate that it meets Middle States Standard III.2.a:


III. Design and Delivery of the Student Learning Experience

2. student learning experiences that are designed, delivered, and assessed by faculty (full-time or part-time) and/or other appropriate professionals who are:
a. rigorous and effective in teaching, assessment of student learning, scholarly inquiry, and service, as appropriate to the institution's mission, goals, and policies;


Source: https://www.msche.org/standards/

Note that assessment of student learning must occur.  A standard way to assess student learning is through the use of rubrics.  A logistically simple way to collect all the necessary rubrics for each course is to have it be part of the syllabus that is already being collected for other reasons.

Thus, while rubrics themselves are not a requirement for Middle States, a straightforward way to demonstrate meeting the assessment of student learning is to require rubrics from faculty.

I doubt that anyone from Middle States will actually look at my syllabi.

As part of the review, Middle States will ask for specific syllabi to examine.  If yours is selected and you don't have all the features that the institution claimed, then that goes into the report.  If most of the syllabi selected are not in compliance, then that's a "fun" conversation that the institutional representatives get to have with the Middle States folks and "fun" always rolls downhill internally.

I suspect that if I started taking rubrics seriously, the grades I assign would go down at this school.

Middle States wants institutions to keep college education rigorous.  Whether your institution wants grades to go down to reflect student performance (i.e., stop ripping off the students with grades students did not earn) or wants faculty to step up to be more effectively supportive so that students rise to the occasion and learn (i.e., stop ripping off the students on skills/content they aren't mastering) is unclear.

My bet is the institution hasn't thought through that part.  The institution is focused on having enough evidence to demonstrate III.2.a when clearly they are employing many adjuncts who won't meet the standard as it stands for rigorous, effective, qualified (III.2.b), sufficient in number (III.2.c) and adequately supported (III.2.d).

I have heard that implementing a rubric in the LMS can really speed up grading. That would be useful.

Years ago, LarryC had a great post about how rubrics make grading easier.  The gist was:

* Follow standard rubric assembly with categories and rankings (excellent, good, acceptable, poor, failing) for whatever is relevant for the assignment.

* Put a comment box at the bottom and have a separate list of standard comments from which you can copy and paste into the box.

* Assign no weightings to individual categories to give yourself flexibility.

* Instead, have a key like:
                    *At most, one good and the rest excellent is an A
                    *A mix of excellent and good with at most one acceptable is a B
                    * A mix of excellent, good, and acceptable with nothing below acceptable is a C
                    * A mix with no failing is a D
                    * Any failing is an overall F

*Then, check the relevant rankings in each category, copy and paste three comments into the box, double check that the key indicates a grade lower than the one you plan to assign, and then assign the grade you know is acceptable at your institution for this quality work.

Don't do anything foolish like check a lot of failing and then award a B, but few students will argue that the paper that should be a C per the rubric got a B and it should have been an A.  If students do argue, then you can lower their grade to the C they earned per the rubric and sigh about the original error.

That way, your grading was faster, students get the feedback they need to improve without all that much effort on your part, and you have a way to demonstrate to auditors that you are applying reasonable standards to student work.

[downer]

I'm a fan of rubrics for grading efficiency and consistency and for guiding students. Though in the syllabus? Students will gain little from seeing a decontextualized rubric in a syllabus.

I suspect that the requirement that the rubrics be put in the syllabus is not for the benefit of the students. It is to demonstrate to either Middle States or the college president that the administration has made the faculty do something.

OP, if they make you design rubrics, you are also in control of what's in them.

I have friends who include categories such as "Includes something that surprised me!" and "Taught me something that I didn't already know about the topic!". These won't work for everybody, on every assignment, but they can illustrate what you really value in academic writing, and what you really hope to provoke. One of my friends says that on some assignments, "Tell me something that I don't know" earns an immediate "A". (I assume that there are other parameters in place that condition what counts.)

You can be bold with these.

If they wind up causing more trouble than they are worth, you change them, and say that it's a data-driven decision, and that you are moving forward along the Assessment Spiral.

Honestly, though, it can be a pain to set these up, but the save a ton of time in grading if you are doing anything at scale. I also wish that I'd gotten on board earlier.

I like the idea of being creative with the rubrics. It is important that my courses keep me entertained.

I am already pretty damn quick with my grading. I don't actually expect that rubrics would save me much time.

There is a paradox in the idea that rubrics should be on the syllabus. The syllabus needs to be ready at the start of the semester. But good teaching adjusts to the student needs as the semester develops, and so it is bad to fix the rubrics at the beginning of the semester.

[nonsensical]

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.

The papers I wrote in college were graded using rubrics. Probably in high school too, at least some of the time, though it's hard to remember that far back.

[marshwiggle]

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.

This is the big thing. Smart students will have the intuition to get things mostly right without explicit instructions. But the weaker the students are, the worse it will get without guidance.

I have friends who include categories such as "Includes something that surprised me!" and "Taught me something that I didn't already know about the topic!". These won't work for everybody, on every assignment, but they can illustrate what you really value in academic writing, and what you really hope to provoke. One of my friends says that on some assignments, "Tell me something that I don't know" earns an immediate "A". (I assume that there are other parameters in place that condition what counts.)

Or not. I had a prof who said "7/10 is what you get for meeting the requirements. To get more than that you have to impress me." I hated that with a white-hot passioin then, and I have vowed my entire teaching career to never be so obnoxiously unclear.

Will he be "impressed" if I

• Cite a dozen sources?
• Do 3 pages of data analysis?
• Spend a page discussing questions that arise out of this?
• All of the above?
• None of the above?

I've also heard of profs who never give anything 100%, since "nobody's perfect".

If an instructor is unable to clearly communicate their expectations to their students, then that's on them; NOT the students. If nobody gets a question right on your exam, you'd better look really hard at it to figure out why.

[Caracal]

I've also heard of profs who never give anything 100%, since "nobody's perfect".

I've never given a 100 on an in class essay or paper. I don't have a principled objection to it, I've just never had anything that was that good. This semester I gave a student a 99 on an in class essay which was the best of those I've ever graded. Despite being a really great essay, there were a few things that could have been a little bit better-an argument or two that could have been sharper.

I design my rubric for those essays so that most of the point can be lost by not doing the things you're supposed to do. However, other points have to be gained by going beyond that. A good solid essay that meets the requirements and ticks all the boxes without doing much beyond that, gets somewhere in the 93 range. To do better than that, an essay needs to do more than just tick the boxes.

There's nothing unfair about this. Students who get 92s on essay exams are usually going to get As in the course. Certainly, the student who got a 99 is a going to get an A.

[downer]

I just gave 120% to a student for a paper that went above and beyond requirements for an A.

[pepsi_alum]

(redacted)

[Caracal]

I just gave 120% to a student for a paper that went above and beyond requirements for an A.

There's nothing wrong with that, but presumably this fits within your overall grading scheme. If you were always giving students 120%, and as a result, 90 percent of the class got an A that would be a problem. Similarly, if my rubric which makes it very hard to get a 98, much less a 100 on some assignments, resulted in nobody getting an A in the course, unless they were a genius, that would be bad.

Neither of us is doing those things. We just find think about grades and points in different ways and calibrate our grades accordingly.

[downer]

I read over the instructions about rubrics from the dean again. It says to include a rubric in the syllabus and to upload a rubric to the LMS.

It does not say we actually have to use a rubric for the grading. So I'm feeling better about this.

[Hibush]

I read over the instructions about rubrics from the dean again. It says to include a rubric in the syllabus and to upload a rubric to the LMS.

It does not say we actually have to use a rubric for the grading. So I'm feeling better about this.

The humanities folks talk about "close reading". Good to see it come to practical use.

[Aster]

I read over the instructions about rubrics from the dean again. It says to include a rubric in the syllabus and to upload a rubric to the LMS.

It does not say we actually have to use a rubric for the grading. So I'm feeling better about this.

If I am reading this correctly, you're saying that your dean is telling you that professors can choose to not follow their own posted syllabus policies?

Why would a professor post a grading rubric to an official syllabus if that rubric was not going to be followed by that professor? Is that not a violation of one's own syllabus policy? What was the point of posting the syllabus in the first place? What are students supposed to believe regarding this rubric?

I must not be hearing this correctly.

[downer]

I read over the instructions about rubrics from the dean again. It says to include a rubric in the syllabus and to upload a rubric to the LMS.

It does not say we actually have to use a rubric for the grading. So I'm feeling better about this.

If I am reading this correctly, you're saying that your dean is telling you that professors can choose to not follow their own posted syllabus policies?

Why would a professor post a grading rubric to an official syllabus if that rubric was not going to be followed by that professor? Is that not a violation of one's own syllabus policy? What was the point of posting the syllabus in the first place? What are students supposed to believe regarding this rubric?

I must not be hearing this correctly.

The syllabus is about 10 pages single spaced. It includes lots of university and departmental policies and statements. There is one about attendance that once I tried to follow and the dean told me not to. I don't think anyone reads most of the syllabus.

So I will place a grading rubric in the syllabus because the dean told me to, because Middle States "requires it" (according to some higher dean). The dean has not told me to use a rubric in grading, and I probably won't. Indeed, the dean has at no point said that rubrics are pedagogically worthwhile.

The syllabus long ago ceased to be a useful action-guiding document, for the most part. Rather, it is repository of all sorts of statements and rules that are up for a myriad of interpretations or can just be ignored. Of course, in trying to justify an action, one can often say "I'm following what it says in the syllabus" as people do with sacred texts.

[Aster]

There can be quite a bit of difference between a syllabus' "institutional boilerplate" versus the customized content created by the individual professor for the course.

So, to be clear, the Dean told you to put a rubric in your syllabus. But the Dean did not specifically state that professors could disregard those syllabus rubrics? That's just how you're choosing to interpret this? You do not actually have any documentation from your Dean endorsing or even allowing professors to not follow their own posted rubric assessments?

This is an important distinction, where the wrong answer can lead down a very slippery slope. If you choose to disregard your own personally written syllabus policies regarding something as important as grading assessment criteria, you may open yourself up to a lot of trouble. Trouble with students, trouble with parents, trouble with the administration. I really don't see an upside here. I would argue that the benefits of the rare possibility of complying with an accreditor's spot inspection is negligible versus the real repercussions of finding yourself (repeatedly) on the wrong end of a grading dispute with a student, the wrong end of a grading dispute with a parent, the wrong end of a grading dispute with an administrator, etc... Professors can get formally reprimanded for violating their own posted syllabus policies, and in some cases even fired.

I'd strongly recommend conferring with your colleagues about this at your institution. One of the things I would specifically look for would be other professors' syllabi at your institution. If everyone is supposed to be using rubrics, then you should be seeing that on everybody else' syllabi. Examine those rubrics to see just how much flexibility you can operate with on the up-and-up. Keep your syllabus legit.

If the Dean teaches courses, I'd pull up his/her syllabus from the college's database and use it and other "important people's" syllabi as guides.

[downer]

Obviously the Dean is hoping that people will not completely subvert the whole rubric enterprise, and would not be happy if I publicized my approach to the other faculty.

But as for the risks to me, I have various factors in my favor.
1. This school seems not that far from major financial problems, and Deans have far bigger problems than worrying about my courses, which run smoothly. I'd guess that the school is likely to close in the next few years.
2. The students are very passive and have never complained about anything. They don't even fill out course evaluations.
3. I wouldn't much care if they stopped hiring me anyway.
4. If I do want to keep the job, and there are problems, I can always use the "Sorry, I didn't understand" defense.
5. There will probably be general chaos on this issue since this school relies heavily on adjunct faculty who probably will hardly notice the email from the Dean or follow through on it, and even the FT faculty seem to experience plenty of difficulties in integrating required "new-fangled" innovations, such as using an LMS.