The Pros and Cons of Rubrics

March 15th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

I read on Professor Maryellen Weimer’s excellent higher education teaching blog, The Teaching Professor, a post about a discussion college teachers were having about the pros and cons of using rubrics to grade student products.

It’s an interesting discussion and probably something you and your teaching colleagues have discussed before: do rubrics guide both teacher and student or do they limit student creativity and independent thinking?

I love rubrics. My first year teaching English taught me more than I taught my students. I learned very early that if I didn’t provide students with a rubric, the essays I would receive would be so diverse as to make grading impossible. Without a rubric, it’s tough to justify to students and parents why Justin’s three-page tongue-in-cheek career profile of a U.F.O. tracker received an A (incredible voice) and Aaron’s poorly proofread and generic career profile on the same subject received a C .

Assigning without a rubric means that as a teacher, you really don’t have a clear vision of the product you want and how you will assess it. In the real world, if I asked a designer to craft a logo for me, I would choose options like color, size, and digital reproducibility. It’s a rare thing in the world of work for a boss to give a project to a worker and say, “Do what feels right. Be creative.” In that sense, I think that rubrics mirror real-world expectations.

Those expectations are important to students who are struggling to finish the project at 8 p.m. the night before it’s due. The expectations are even more important to the parent who is trying to assist the student. Furthermore, when it’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday night and I’m wading through my stack of papers, I don’t have to spend time wondering what to do with Matt’s essay on crop circles, which contains more illustrations than words.

The rubric helps me at 9 p.m. Sunday night when I’m drafting my week’s lesson plans, too. The state standards drive my lesson’s objectives and my assessments had better measure students’ understanding of those objectives. If students don’t know what product they should turn in and I don’t know how to grade the random essays I receive, how can I assess whether or not a student understood the material?

Rubrics have their limitations. It’s true, though, that a song about a songwriter would be a fitting way to meet the project’s objectives. However, the song doesn’t fit into my rubric. It’s not an essay, it’s a song. Now what do I do?

Maybe I have the wrong rubric. The kid who writes the song meets the research expectation, but the content’s not in the format I expected. The mistake teachers sometimes make in using rubrics is that they don’t include the class on the conversation.

The compromise between conformity and creativity. To make sure everyone understands the project’s expectations, it’s a great idea to have a two-pronged approach to the rubric. Make your own rubric while you’re planning the unit. Figure out what students need to demonstrate to master the objectives.
In class, explain the project. Place students in think-pair-share groups to discuss what criteria they would use to judge the project. Ask for a volunteer to take notes for the class on the whiteboard and take criteria suggestions from the crowd. Circle those items that have more than one vote. Underline those that you have in your own rubric. Talk about the products and how each criterion will be evaluated. Show the class your rubric and add suggestions from the class’s discussion.

By having this pre-work discussion, students can show their creativity on the front end of the project. They have a say in what distinguishes a successful project from one that doesn’t meet expectations. The students have ownership and have begun the thought process that will lead to the project development. This isn’t a waste of class time; it’s think time.

Best of all, when you receive the students’ projects, you’ll have a rubric to guide you. You won’t be surprised with a clay sculpture when you expected a lab write up. And you’ll be assured that your lesson’s objectives, the students’ work, and everyone’s expectations all line up.

Tags: assessment, grades, grading, lesson plan, rubric