What is a Rubric?
Why Use Rubrics?
TL;DR – jump straight to Which rubric tool do I need?
There are several advantages to using rubrics in your assessments. For markers, a well-designed rubric can indicate what to look out for in the assessed piece of work, describe what different levels of achievement might look like, and help to refine decision-making (Bloxham et al 2011, Isaacson and Stacy 2009). For teaching teams, rubrics can also help to support reliability and consistency in the evaluation of student work. They can be particularly useful with large student cohorts that require multiple markers, especially when they are developed as part of a wider calibration discussion among the teaching team. Collaborating on a rubric can help to surface tacit expectations and to find some consensus on expected standards.
Rubrics can also make the marking process itself much more efficient. When using a rubric, markers can indicate levels of achievement against criteria with a series of simple clicks. Common student missteps can be used to inform the rubric text, removing the need to type the same feedback on multiple pieces of work. In some cases, a well-designed rubric may alone provide sufficient feedback for the assessed work; where it does not, rubric tools also allow for the addition of personalised, free text comments for students.
Rubrics can also improve the assessment experience for students. When provided in advance, and supported by discussion with teaching staff, they can help students to understand academic expectations around how knowledge is constructed and communicated in their discipline. Asking students to use rubrics, to grade anonymised or example submissions, can help to develop their assessment literacy (Hendry and Anderson 2012). Including rubrics in assessment can help to add detail, to make feedback more transparent, and to indicate pathways to improvement against the criteria (Jones et al 2017, Jönsson and Panadero 2017).
None of this is to suggest that rubrics can resolve the complexities of marker reliability, the inevitable subjectivity of academic judgement, or the challenges students face in interpreting assessment requirements. There is much discussion in the literature about these issues (see for example McConlogue 2020 and Bloxham et al 2015), but all of it recognises that in order to be able to grade students at all, we must have some agreed standards, and we must be able to communicate these to students. Rubrics are not a magic wand, but they can be a useful tool to support dialogue and alignment around standards.
What options are available for building rubrics?
Rubrics can be as simple as a spreadsheet, or a table in a Word document. That said, the University’s licensed suite of digital learning tools provides a few tools designed specifically for this purpose. These tools do not all offer the same functionality or work in the same way. This guidance is intended to help you identify which tool might be right for a particular assessment workflow.
Blackboard allows you to build rubrics and attach them to assignments, journals or discussions. There is an option to create or attach a rubric whenever you create or edit these activities, and you can also access your rubrics from the Gradebook settings menu. Full user guides for Blackboard Rubrics are available on the Anthology website, and the AI Designer in Blackboard can help you to populate them.
There are five different types of rubric available in Blackboard. Here’s a quick overview of the options:
- Percentage – add weightings for each criterion, and then a fixed percentage against each level of achievement (e.g. 100%, 75%, 50% for different levels). This option will calculate a total mark out of 100, but it will only allow you to award a fixed percentage for each level.
- Percentage range – as with the option above, you add weightings for each criterion, but you then add a percentage range against each level of achievement. This means instructors can specify an exact percentage within that range (so within the 60-69 range, you can award a 62, for example). This option has more nuance than the standard percentage option, and allows you to award marks that align with the University grading schemas. It will also calculate a total mark out of 100.
- Points – in these options, the criteria are not weighted, and the marks are calculated cumulatively. Instructors specify a number of points for each box on the grid. These are added up as they are selected by the marker, so depending what points you use, the total may be more or less than 100
- Points range option – similar to the above, but you can specify a range for each level of achievement. We wouldn’t recommend using the University grading schemas with this option, as this results in very high total marks!
- No points rubric – used to provide feedback without grades
Other things to know about Blackboard rubrics:
- They are created directly in the Blackboard web interface. They can’t be imported into or exported out of Blackboard, though they can be copied between modules.
- Rubrics in Blackboard belong to the module, not to individual instructors. Anyone who is an instructor on the module can edit a rubric (as long as it is not already being used to grade an assessment).
Turnitin rubrics can be created when you set up the assignment, or when you come to grade student submissions. When creating an assignment, you can open the Rubric Manager from the Optional Settings list. When grading, you can create a rubric from the side menu in Feedback Studio. Full user guides for Turnitin rubrics are available on the Turnitin support website.
There are two main choices: a rubric (grid format) or a grading form (a list of criteria). Both formats provide options for calculating grades. Here’s a quick overview of the options:
- Standard (percentage) rubric – this works in a similar way to Blackboard’s percentage rubric. You provide a weighting for each of the criteria, and then allocate a specific number of points, from 100 down to zero, for each level of achievement. This option will calculate a total mark out of 100, but it will only allow you to award a fixed number of points for each level of achievement.
- Custom rubric – this works in a similar way to the points option in Blackboard. You can add specific values to each cell (but only up to 99), and the rubric tool will add them up based on which cells you select when grading. Depending on what point values you enter, the total mark may be more or less than 100.
- Qualitative rubric – as with other rubric types, this option allows you to write qualitative descriptions for each level of achievement, but it doesn’t associate this with points values or calculate a total grade.
- Grading form – with this tool you write a description for each criterion, but not for each level of achievement. If you choose to enable scoring, you enter marks manually against each criterion when grading, and the tool will calculate the total mark from these.
The option to switch between the different types of rubric looks different, depending on whether you are creating the rubric alongside the assignment, or adding it later. If you’re not sure how to set up the type you want, please get in touch.
Other things to know about Turnitin rubrics:
- Rubrics can be created directly in the interface, or imported from Excel. It is worth noting that there is a character limit for the criterion name, so if these are longer in your spreadsheet they will be truncated on import.
- Turnitin rubrics and grading forms belong to individual instructors, rather than to a Blackboard module, although once they are attached to an assignment, all the instructors on that module will be able to use it for grading that assignment. They can be shared with other staff by exporting and re-importing.
Full user guides for Gradescope (including guidance on grading for the different assignment types) are available on the Gradescope website.
Gradescope rubrics can be used to quickly provide feedback to students, and to calculate marks, as with the other tools covered here. However, Gradescope assignments use rubrics in a significantly different way to other tools. Where Blackboard and Turnitin fix the rubric, at the point of attaching it to an assignment, in Gradescope the rubrics can be created or edited during the marking process.
In Gradescope, you can set up a rubric in advance when you create the assignment, specifying criteria and points for each question on the paper, or you can choose to create or edit the rubric as you mark. As you review the submitted papers, you can add additional rubric items related to common mistakes, or you can adjust the scoring you provide (for example, you might decide to add partial credit for a question if it becomes clear that many students got part way to the answer).
As more items are added to the rubric, the speed of the marking process picks up because items in the rubric may be applied quickly to subsequent papers via keyboard shortcuts. If you adjust the rubric, it will apply the updated points and feedback for that answer to all the matching student responses (including papers you have already marked). Rubric additions are shared between markers and adjustments to the rubric are retrospectively applied to previously marked scripts.
It is worth noting that the Gradescope rubric is based on the allocation of points, using either positive or negative scoring. While it is technically possible to use Gradescope to create a no-score, formative rubric purely to provide feedback to students, it’s not a great user experience as the interface will still display the zero-point score for each question. Other tools are better suited for this use case.
Full user guides are available on the FeedbackFruits help site; this guide refers specifically to rubric creation.
In FeedbackFruits, rubrics can be added to the following activity types:
- Peer Review (students provide feedback on each other’s work)
- Group Member Evaluation (students assess their peers’ collaboration skills)
- Skill Review (instructors provide feedback on activities like presentations, no submission)
- Assignment Review (instructors provide feedback on reports or assignments)
- Self Assessment on Skills (students reflect on their performance in an activity)
- Self Assessment of Work (students reflect on a piece of submitted work)
You can also add a simple rubric to feed back on student discussions in the interactive tools.
In each of these activities, you have the choice of building a new rubric, adding a rubric you have already created, adding a rubric from a collection of institutional rubric templates, or adding a rubric from the Learning Design Community (all FeedbackFruits users).
Each rubric can include multiple sections, in three different formats:
- A grid rubric, with descriptions of levels of achievement for a range of criteria
- A scale rating, with a customisable length of scale, and the option to add comments
In the grid rubric, you have an option to add points for each level of achievement, and the rubric will calculate these into an overall grade.
Now that you have a sense of what the different tools can do, it’s time to think about what a rubric could bring to your assessment. We’ve outlined some example use cases below, to help you decide which tool would best fit your needs.
Which rubric tool do I need?
The questions below are intended to help you choose the tool you need. If your use case is not addressed here, please use the contact form or email the team for more guidance.
I want…
The percentage range rubric in Blackboard assignments easily supports the calculation of an overall grade using the grading schema
Blackboard, Turnitin and FeedbackFruits provide options to create rubrics without grading
Gradescope is the only option that currently supports this workflow
Further Reading
Bloxham, S., Boyd, P., & Orr, S. (2011). Mark my words: the role of assessment criteria in UK higher education grading practices. Studies in Higher Education, 36(6), 655–670. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075071003777716
Bloxham, S., den-Outer, B., Hudson, J., & Price, M. (2015). Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(3), 466–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1024607
Hendry, G. D., & Anderson, J. (2012). Helping students understand the standards of work expected in an essay: using exemplars in mathematics pre-service education classes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), 754–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2012.703998
Isaacson, J.J. & Stacy, A.S. (2009) Rubrics for clinical evaluation: Objectifying the subjective experience. Nurse Education in Practice, 9(2), 134-140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2008.10.015
Jones, L., Allen., B., Dunn, P. & Brooker, L. (2017) Demystifying the rubric: a five-step pedagogy to improve student understanding and utilisation of marking criteria, Higher Education Research & Development, 36(1), 129-142. 10.1080/07294360.2016.1177000.
Jönsson, A. & Panadero, E. (2017) ‘The Use and Design of Rubrics to Support Assessment for Learning’ in Scaling up Assessment for Learning in Higher Education, edited by David Carless, et al., Springer Singapore.
McConlogue, T. (2020). Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education: A Guide for Teachers. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xprqb
