Academic Assessment

Rubrics provide a specific set of criteria used for assessing a particular type of student work or performance and provides more details than a single grade. Rubrics also allow for more objective assessment of students' achievement of learning outcomes. They directly connect to learning outcomes. When the intended learning outcomes are best indicated by performances—things students would do, make, say, or write—then rubrics are the best way to assess them. (Susan M. Brookhart)

Effective rubrics can:

• Measure higher-order skills or evaluate complex tasks
• Clarify learning goals
• Align students to your expectations
• Foster self-learning and self-improvement in students
• Aid students in self-assessment
• Inspire better student performance
• Improve feedback to students
• Result in faster and easier scoring of assessments
• Enable more accurate, unbiased, and consistent scoring
• Reduce regrading requests from students
• Provide feedback to faculty and staff (Suskie, 2009, Wolf & Stevens, 2007).

Rubrics typically include 2 major components:

1. a coherent set of criteria for students' work
2. descriptions of levels of performance.

Criteria:

It is recommended that you establish 3 - 8 criteria that outlines what students should achieve. The criteria are important and should include specific skills that should be demonstrated. Criteria should link to the intended learning outcome. 

Criteria descriptions should be brief, understandable, and in a logical order for students to follow as they work through a task. 

Performance Levels:

Performance levels can be both qualitative and quantitative. Each level should be distinct. Select phrases that will explain what performance looks like at each level, making sure they are discrete enough to show real differences. Levels of performance should match the related criterion. Assigned point value may be added for each of the performance levels. 

Each performance level should have its own descriptive paragraph. These descriptors are explicit descriptions of each performance level per criterion. These tell students what is expected for each level of performance. 

Most rubrics are designed to have the criteria as rows and performance levels as columns. But this is not a stead fast rule. In general, most rubrics are created and presented similar to the table below:

University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Norming for Program-level Assessment with Multiple Evaluators

Once your rubric is created, it's a good practice to complete the norming process. This process helps to establish an acceptable level of consistency (Schoepp et al., 2018). This document is a great resource for describing the norming process. Below are other norming resources.

• An Effective Rubric Norming Process
• Running a Grade-Norming Session
• Norming on Student Artifacts for General Education Assessment: Tips and Tricks