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Rubrics: The Cure-All in Education?
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I have been thinking a lot about rubrics for the past several years. I wrote a column ("Rubrics: Educational Want Ads") about it last summer, and teams in all departments in my high school have been asked to have common rubrics for student assignments. Actually, we've devised common rubrics for ten years. Even college teachers are being encouraged to share rubrics with students so they will understand the criteria on which their grade will be based.
This works well when the criteria are very specific: a certain number of problems missed= a particular grade, or a certain number of misspelled words=a particular grade.
When rubrics become less useful is with older students, where the criteria are more complex. How do you quantify good writing? Is it about having 5 paragraphs and a thesis statement? Ask any writer, and the answer will be "no." That's not how good writing is judged in the real world.
Yet administrators love to think that if parents and students are given a rubric, all grade complaints will disappear. And that is simply not the case! Teachers who have worked together with a similar rubric know that there will still be grade differences based on each teacher's understanding of "good," "sophisticated," "mature," and whatever words are used to judge the quality of the work.
Where rubrics are useful, though, is when used in tandem with student samples. That's the way College Board and ETS judge student essays on AP tests and SATs. Once teachers are trained to recognize that a certain type of argument, or a certain level of style or voice in writing equals a particular grade, the assigning of grades is much more consistent. Unfortunately, most teachers don't have the time to work with student samples as well as rubrics, so grading variations will inevitably occur, even when teachers are using the same rubric. Rubrics are not a cure-all!
Topics: advanced placement , college board , SAT , rubric , ETS
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