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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

May 1, 2014

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Whether you’re new to rubrics, or you just don’t know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

So let’s talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we’re going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics,  holistic and analytic , plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we’ll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Holistic Rubrics

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary ). What each level is called isn’t what makes the rubric holistic — it’s the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you’re an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, “I’m sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time.”

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it’s easy on the teacher — in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn’t provide targeted feedback to students , which means they’re unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, “Why did you give me a 2?” If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he’ll say something like, “Read the rubric.” Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she’s doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there’s no time (or need, though that’s hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing — the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

Analytic Rubrics

An analytic rubric  breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you’d give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation , but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort . To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, “the recipient is crowded during the meal” to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages , however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time . Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work — completing the “3” column in this rubric, for example — is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won’t necessarily read the whole thing.  Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won’t clearly understand what’s expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you’re willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

Single-Point Rubrics

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency ; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the “Criteria” column is exactly the same as the “3” column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short (“runny eggs,” for example) and how they excelled (“vase of flowers”). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met,  you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you’ve never used a single-point rubric, it’s worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several  advantages : (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create , while still providing rich detail about what’s expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended . When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can’t find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there’s no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined “Advanced” column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. “If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level,” says Fluckiger. “Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended.”

The main disadvantage  of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher’s part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher’s Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications.  Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5 .

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom.  Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation , 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25 .

Know Your Terms  is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn’t want to admit you didn’t know what it meant, send it to me via the  contact  form and I’ll research it for you. 

What to Read Next

Categories: Instruction , Learning Theory

Tags: assessment , college teaching , Grades 3-5 , Grades 6-8 , Grades 9-12 , Grades K-2 , know your terms , rubrics

69 Comments

Jen, This is an awesome, thoughtful post and idea. I’m using this in my class with a final project the kids are turning in this morning. I’m excited about the clarity with which I can evaluate their projects.

I’m so glad to hear it. If you’re willing to share what you made and tell me how it all went later on, I would be thrilled to hear it.

So appreciated! These practical, detailed applications are helpful! Mahalo from Kauai, Hi.

Rubrics are great tools for making expectations explicit. Thanks for this post which gives me some vocabulary to discuss rubrics. Though, I could use some resources on rubric scoring, b/c I see a lot of teachers simply adding up the number of squares and having that be the total point value of an assignment, which leads to incorrect grades on assignments. I’ve found some converters, but haven’t found a resource that has the math broken out.

Thanks for the feedback, Jeremey! You are not the first person to request a clearer breakdown on the math for this rubric (or others), and you’re right, teachers definitely have different approaches to this. I have some good ideas on this, so I will plan a post on it for the near future.

Did you do a post regarding grading a single rubric?

Yup! Here’s Meet the Single Point Rubric . You might also be interested in How To Turn Rubric Scores into Grades . Hope this helps!

Really rubric is a very useful tool when assessing students in class

There is no such thing as an appropriate converter. Levels are levels and points and percentages are points and percentages and never the twain should meet.

(I’m very late to the discussion.)

Years ago, Ken O’Connor was the person who turned my grading around. For that reason, I would be against using the “0-80%” or “0-80 points” piece. O’Connor is very clear about how grades below 50 ruin a grade average.

I would love to be able to grade with standards only, but what I do instead, to fit into our district grading software, is to grade by standards (using letters, where “proficient” is a “B”), and the traditional letters are equal to 95/85/75/65/55. That gives kids a chance if they ever somehow earn only a F. It doesn’t kill the rest of their grade.

(I forgot to say that I absolutely love the one-column rubric. It is going to be a huge help to me this year.)

This post was so helpful! I am struggling right now with assigning Habits of Work grades to my Spanish students in middle and high school. I was using an analytic rubric for both my assessment and the students’ self-assessment, but it’s possible the quantity of words was exacerbating the problem of students scoring themselves in the best column out of reflex or habit. I’m going to try a single-point rubric to see if that can lead us to some more reflective thought.

This website was very helpful. Thank you.

LOVELY post. So didactic and useful. After reading some quite dense posts on rubrics, I’ve enjoyed this a lot. You have now convinced me to use rubrics! THANK YOU Jenny and CONGRATS!!!

SINGLE-POINT rubrics

I have not seen or heard of single point rubrics. I’m really excited to try that out. Less wordy and easier for students to see what is expected of them and get meaningful feedback.

Oooh! I never thought I’d like a post on rubrics, but this was awesome! Thanks for your great explanations. I’m currently working my way through your Teacher’s Guide to Tech/Jumpstart program and I wanted to take a minute and tell you how much I appreciate your site and podcasts too. Everything is so concise, interesting and helpful!

Sariah, thank you!! I haven’t gotten a ton of feedback on the JumpStart program, so it’s really nice to hear that! Let me know if you have any questions!

I am Master of Mathematics Education student and I am busy compiling my assignments on rubrics. Your notes are well explained and straight to the point. However, my Professor have instructed as to look up on primarily rubrics and multi-trait rubrics that i seems not to get. Do you care to differentiate them for me? Thank you.

Hi Martha. I was not familiar with those two terms, so I did a bit of reading in this post: http://carla.umn.edu/assessment/vac/improvement/p_5.html It seems to me that a primary trait rubric focuses on a single, somewhat broad description of how well the student achieved a certain goal. Multi-trait rubrics allow teachers to assess a task on a variety of descriptors. To me, the primary trait seems very much like the holistic rubric, and the multi-trait rubric seems a lot like an analytic rubric. If anyone else reading this knows the finer points of the differences among these four, I would love to hear them!

How to better calculate a grade with a rubric. Please see: http://tinypic.com/r/2dl6d5c/9 .

Thank you so much for this humorous and informative approach to rubrics. It seems to me that the single-point rubric, which I agree makes the most sense for assignment specific rubrics, is really just a clear set of assignment instructions / expectations with the addition of over/under columns to make it rubric-ish.

I love to have students help create rubrics. By the end of the year, we often create the entire rubric together as a class, but often I allow them to start by assigning one “open” section that they think I should grade on for which I help them write “exceeds, meets, doesn’t meet” standards. Then we move on to them assigning points for each standard that I’ve written (this is fascinating for me to see what they weight more heavily), and finally on to writing their own categories for which I write the standards, and then we reverse so that I write the categories and they write the standards. I give a lot of writing and speaking assignments and they really like being involved in how and what and how much we grade. (I never find they are too easy on themselves, either.) I love the single-point rubric especially for assignments I come up with off the cuff and don’t have time to write an elaborate rubric for!

If you’re moving away from traditional grades, the single-point rubric is a perfect instrument for delivering specific feedback.

This is a great site and I really liked the one example used with the multiple rubric styles so we could really understand the difference in them. I am confused about the difference between a Single Point rubric and a Primary Trait rubric. You didn’t mention the Primary Trait rubric so I am wondering if they are the same. Thank you, Karen

Thanks for writing in and for your kind words! I work for Cult of Pedagogy, and in answering your question, I started scrolling myself. Jenn responded to another reader, and I think you might find her response helpful as well as the link:

http://carla.umn.edu/assessment/vac/improvement/p_5.html

“It seems to me that a primary trait rubric focuses on a single, somewhat broad description of how well the student achieved a certain goal. Multi-trait rubrics allow teachers to assess a task on a variety of descriptors. To me, the primary trait seems very much like the holistic rubric, and the multi-trait rubric seems a lot like an analytic rubric.”

Hope this helps!

I do a sort of analytic + single point. I don’t include lots of writing on an analytic rubric. I give them the thick descriptions printed out earlier and I go over them (so each category actually does have detailed descriptions), but the rubric I mark is made up of lots of space and numbers 1-10. I keep it to ten categories. I leave lots of space for comments and comment on every category (even if it’s just one word). I conference with each student briefly when I hand back the rubrics. Each student is given two attempts – first for feedback, second for growth and a final score. (I taught high school theatre, so this method worked the best for me.)

Jen, Thank you for succinctly explaining the types of rubrics and THANK YOU for the free downloadable templates. I will share them with my education senior students!!! AWEsome work you have done.

You are very welcome, Alberta!

Dear Jennifer,

Thank you for the detailed information. I have been using single point rubrics from last year and I love them, but do you think we should give students a checklist as well? If so, what should it look like? I don’t want to kill their creativity, though.

I think the rubric can contain a checklist if you want students to include specific things in their end product, or you could do a separate checklist, then add something like “all items from checklist are included” in your rubric language. There is definitely a gray area here: Defining requirements too narrowly could stifle creativity, but it’s also important to be clear about expectations.

I have been working on a variation of the single-point rubric that I think might be even more useful for communicating expectations and feedback to students. Check it out here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12JBIcpjeDYuTbQhEgJg2LKC5YPMDwTcIYCtl6jSGTeE/edit?usp=sharing

Really appreciate this post! Thank you. I have used the analytic approach, but I can really see the benefits of a single-point system. Thanks for your clear explanation.

Saying that ‘analytical’ rubrics are difficult and time consuming to write is true, but is also a cop-out. Taking the time to clearly define and articulate student behaviours at each level promotes student independence and self-assessment, and results in better outcomes. The fact that students have departed from what’s written on your rubric suggests that either the assessment wasn’t explained well enough or the rubric itself is of poor quality.

The analytical rubrics provided here fall well short of quality rubric standards. I would suggest reading Patrick griffin’s Assessment for Teaching, and visit the ReliableRubrics websites for good examples.

Thanks for the book and website suggestions, Martin. I do think it’s possible to construct a clear 4-column analytical rubric, but I have rarely seen one that manages to cover all the bases. The ones that DO cover every possible outcome are often insanely long. I’m thinking of some I got in grad school that were–I kid you not–several pages long and written in 9-point font. Despite the fact that I am a diligent student, even I got to the point where I threw in the towel and stopped reading the whole thing. Instead, I just gave my attention to the “3” and “4” columns. I’m guessing that other students do the same thing. If our goal is to have students understand what’s being asked of them and to pay attention to the details, why spend so much time on defining what NOT to do?

Thank you Jennifer, I have shared this with fellow colleagues in Costa Rica. I know this will be of great use!!

Thank you for this work. Your site has been very helfpul to me.

Thank you so much Jennifer! You seem to be an expert in making rubrics! I really appreciate the simplicity of the delivery of your thoughts about rubrics. I just want to ask if there is such a rubric for a cooperative activity? I am Geraldine, by the way, and me and my classmates are planning to conduct cooperative listening activities among Grade 8 students. We are having a hard time looking for a rubric that will assess their outputs as a group. Can you suggest one? Your response will be of great help. Thank you so much. May God bless you more and always!

Hi Geraldine, I work with Cult of Pedagogy and although we can’t think of anything specific to what you’re looking for, I’m thinking you might want to check out our Assessment & Feedback Pinterest board — there are a ton or resources that might help you create a rubric that would be specific to your needs. The most important thing is to identify what you want students to be able to do in the end. For example: listen to others with eye contact. (Be sure to check out Understanding by Design .) Then you can choose a rubric structure that will best fit your needs and provide effective feedback. Other than that, you might be able to find some great ideas through a Google search.

Well, thank you so much! May God bless you!

Great information. Can you tell me how you come to a total/final score on an analytic rubric if the student receives a variety of scores in the different categories? Thanks.

This is a great question! I’d check out Jenn’s post, Speed Up Grading with Rubric Codes . Even if you don’t use the codes, you’ll see in the video how an overall score can be given to a paper, even when scores in indivual categories vary. Basically the overall score reflects where most criteria have been met, along with supportive feedback. Hope this helps!

I loved the all of the rubrics you created for “Breakfast In Bed”. Your topic was an awesome analogy for teacher created tasks. I personally prefer the analytic rubric because I believe it gives the most accurate feedback to the student. If you feel more information is needed, you could expand the categories in the rubric, for example in this case, you could add a column called “sensory enhancements” , such as music or table setting. If you want to add a more personal comment you can always add it in the margin.

This issue has always frustrated me. I have recently been a HUGE proponent of holistic rubrics, but I do see the disadvantage of the feedback issue. For my first time teaching college composition, I used analytic rubrics–and hated them. It wasn’t the making rubrics that was time consuming, but determining how to break up the points and how to assign earned points for a paper. I would score a paper, add up all the points, and realized the paper got a B when, in reality, I knew it was a C-level paper. So I would erase and recalculate until I got the points I thought were more accurate. It took FOREVER!!! After some research, I decided to move to a holistic rubric, and it made grading way faster, but more importantly, I thought the numerical grade was much more accurate and consistent. (Score 6 would get a 95, 5 would be 85, etc., and I would give + or – for 3 more or less points). For feedback, I would annotate and underline/circle the parts of the criteria that they struggled in or did well in and left an end comment. And while I had them turn in a draft that I would give feedback on, I didn’t use the rubric for the draft feedback. Just comments on the paper.

I’m willing to try to single-point, but to get to that final numerical grade (since a no-grade classroom isn’t allowed, unfortunately) you’d still have to break down the points arbitrarily like an analytic rubric. Who’s to say that “structure” should be 30 points while “grammar” should be 10? What’s the actual difference between a 40/50 in “analysis” and a 42/50? My grading PTSD is resurfacing just thinking about grading essays that way. But at the same time, I also don’t like the limited feedback of the holistic rubric.

This is a link to a site where you can download a PDF that talks about a lot of composition issues, but pages 74-76 is about rubrics. Curious to know everyone’s thoughts. https://community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-1593

Thank you so much 🙂 I learned a lot from this kind of Rubrics 🙂 (y)

Thank you very much for the breakdown of the the types of rubrics. This was very informational!

Thank you for the fantastic article. I came here from the Single Point Rubric post, and I feel so much better equipped to grade my next assignment. Thank you again!

Radhika, Yay! We are glad you found what you needed for your next assignment!

Jennifer, the clear, concise explanations of three types of rubrics are very refreshing. I teach a course called “Assessment and Measurement” to pre-service teachers and I introduce the analytic and holistic rubrics for them to use in performance assessments. The pre-service teachers spend a lot of time with just the language they want to use and, although I think rubrics are the path to more accuracy in grading, I find the idea is overwhelming to novice teachers. May I share this with my students? Of course giving you due credit. This is excellent.

Hi Hazel! Thanks for the positive feedback. You are welcome to share this post with your students!

Thank you! Your picture at the very beginning (and your examples) made the difference between holistic and analytical instantly click for me! Also, I have never heard of single point rubrics before, so I am excited to try them out this fall with an assignment or two that I think they would go perfectly with! Lastly, thanks for the templates!

I’ve been using rubrics for a long time. I started with the most complex, comprehensive things you cannot even imagine. It drove the kids crazy, and me too. Now I teach English to adults (as a 2nd or nth language) and I write much simpler rubrics. But they still have too much information. You are brilliant here with the single point rubric. What do you need to do to get it right? Write in the ways they didn’t match it, which is what you need to do anyways. I’m changing immediately to single point rubrics. I’ll also read your other posting about single point rubrics to see if you have any other ideas. I just met your blog this week (Online Global Academy) and will return, I’m sure. Many thanks. Lee

This is great to hear, Lee! Thanks for sharing.

I’ve always used rubrics but especially appreciate the single point rubric.

Hi My name is Andrena Weir, I work at the American School of Marrakech. Thank you so much for your information. As a Physical Ed teacher these rubrics are great. I like the one column rubric. I feel I spent too much time grading in ways that consume too much time. This is so much appreciated. I need someone like you to be in-contact with if I’m struggling to retrieve new Ideas. Thank you so very much, have the best day.

How about this type of rubric. Al the benefits of analytic but without the verbiage.

The food is raw/burned under/over cooked perfectly cooked

The tray is missing missing some items complete and utensils are dirty clean well presented

You get the idea

e.g. For Maths projects

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19MXAjBdiEHXwuxg0w7NkRIKuc4X7VNj1qOE74o_vNss/edit?usp=sharing

The blog destroyed my formatting.

The food is || raw/burned || under/over cooked || perfectly cooked

The tray is || missing || missing some items || complete and utensils are || dirty || clean || well presented

or check the linked example

I use rubrics with most of my practical assignments and yes they are very time consuming. After reading this post I’m very excited to try the single-point rubric. Most of the time my students just want to know what is needed. This way they can identify what I want them to be able to do. Thanks so much for this information about rubrics.

So glad this was helpful, Amy! I’ll be sure to let Jenn know.

Want to use analytical rubric

Thanks so much for all of the information. This is great to have as a resource!

I’ve never heard of a single-point rubric before but I love the idea! Your article totally spoke my language and touched on all of my concerns. Thanks for the tips!

Hi, Jennifer, I always come away with actionable tips. I am a faculty developer and Instructional Coach. Rubrics pose challenges for teachers, novice and seasoned alike, so thank you for these discussions to shine a light on rubrics, good and bad.

Meg, I am glad this post was helpful for you in your role! I will be sure to pass on your comments to Jenn.

Being in a rubricade, a crusade of rubrics, against the powers that might be from my school… I’m glad to read what you’ve made.

Neither the academic coordinator nor the headmaster seems to know anything about having more than four levels of achievement. Nothing about having single point rubrics or the ones needed for my laboratory reports which go up to 7 with numbers not correlative.

I’m a high (and middle) school natural sciences teacher, my specialty field is physics.

The rubric in question (rejected by my superiors) has been developped since my first days in the classroom, about 2 thousand eleven. I’ve been modifying it from time to time according to the new breakthroughs experienced in practice.

Maybe your really nice webpage will help me out in going past this nonsense.

Thanks a lot!

Glad you found this helpful!

A holistic rubric is only easier if the faculty are just slapping grades on assignments, which they shouldn’t be doing with any rubric, including a very detailed analytic one. There should be summary comments that explain how the student’s specific response to the assignment meets the descriptor for each score level and then suggestions for what they could do to improve (even if they got an A).

Thanks for your comment- as Jenn mentions in the post, holistic rubrics are limited in their space for feedback. Many teachers prefer the Single Point Rubric for personalized feedback. If the point of rubrics is to set students up with their next steps, this is one you might want to try!

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Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

• Workshop Recording (Fall 2022)
• Workshop Registration

Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper, single-point rubric, more examples:.

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

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Analytic Rubrics

The who, what, why, where, when, and how of an analytic rubrics.

WHO : Analytic rubrics are for  you  and  your students .

WHAT : An analytic rubric is a scoring tool that helps you identify the criteria that are relevant to the assessment and learning objectives. It is divided into components of the assignment contains a detailed description that clearly states the performance levels (unacceptable to acceptable) and allows you to assign points/grades/levels based on the students’ performance.

WHY: Rubrics help guide students when completing their assignments by giving the guidelines to follow. Students also know what you are looking for in an assignment, and this leads to fewer questions and more time engaged in the assessment and knowledge attainment.  Rubrics help you or your assistant grade assignments objectively from the first submission to the last. Rubrics returned to students with the assignment, give the students basic feedback by selecting the correct criteria they met.

WHERE:  Create a paper rubric or use the Canvas interactive grading rubric. Learn more about using Canvas Rubrics by selecting the following link  https://guides.instructure.com/m/4152/l/724129-how-do-i-add-a-rubric-to-an-assignment

WHEN : Share the analytic rubric before the assessment to share the criteria they must meet and to help guide them when completing the assignment. After the assignment has been completed, return the marked rubric with the assignment as a form of feedback.

HOW:  Watch the following video on Analytic Rubrics.

Optional Handouts: Blank rubric for the session (1)

Rubric Design Activity

Teaching Online: Course Design, Delivery, and Teaching Presence Copyright © by Analisa McMillan. All Rights Reserved.

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Designing Rubrics

Deciding which type of rubric to use.

Rubrics are generally broken down into two types:   holistic  and  analytic .

Holistic Rubrics

A holistic rubric provides students with a general overview of what is expected by describing the characteristics of a paper that would earn an “A,” (or be marked “excellent”), a B (or “proficient”) a C (or “average”) and so on.

Here is an example of a holistic rubric for weekly reading responses in a religion course: 

As you can see, a holistic rubric gives students a sense of the criteria for evaluation (in this case: understanding of the text, engagement with the text, ability to explain significance of argument, organization & ability to answer the prompt, and grammar, mechanics & formatting).  However, it does not assign any particular value to these criteria and therefore allows more room for variation between papers of one grade.

Benefits of Holistic Rubrics:

Holistic rubrics tend to work best for low-stakes writing assignments, and there are several benefits to using a holistic rubric for evaluation:

• They allow for slightly more impressionistic grading, which is useful when papers may vary dramatically from one another.  (This particular rubric would be used to respond to one of several different prompts that students could choose from each week).
• They encourage students to think of all the parts of their writing as interconnected, so (for example) students see organization as connected to clarity of ideas.
• When used for recurring assignments, they allow students to see a trend in the feedback for their writing.
• They allow for quicker grading, since you can highlight or circle specific words or phrases to draw students’ attention to areas of possible improvement.

Drawbacks of Holistic Rubrics:

One potential drawback to holistic rubrics, however, is that it can be difficult for students to identify discrete areas for improvement or get specific examples of common missteps.

Analytic Rubrics

An analytic rubric is one that explicitly breaks down an assignment into its constitutive skills and provides students with guidelines for what each performance level looks like for each skill.

Here is an example of an analytic rubric for the same assignment:

As you can see, an analytic rubric provides students with much clearer definition of the evaluation criteria.  It may or may not assign points to each criteria.

Benefits of Analytic Rubrics: 

Analytic rubrics tend to work well for complex assignments.  There are several benefits to choosing an analytic rubric:

• They allow more specific feedback for students, which can be particularly useful in guiding revision.
• They provide students with more specific guidelines that they can follow when writing their papers.
• They provide students with a sense of your priorities for the assignment.
• They allow for more regular grading.

Drawbacks of Analytic Rubrics:

One drawback to analytic rubrics, however, is that they can be difficult to develop for assignments you’re asking students to complete for the first time; if you haven’t yet seen what can go wrong, it can be difficult to identify what poor performance might look like.

Bean, John C.  Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking,  and Active Learning in the Classroom .  San Francisco: Jossy-Bass, 2001.

“Creating and Using Rubrics.”   The Assessment Office.  The University of Hawaii at Mānoa .  18 December 2013.  Web. 1 June 2014.

“How to Develop a Rubric.”  Ohio State Writing Across the Curriculum Resources .  Ohio State University. Web. 1 June 2014.

“Rubric Development.”  Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment .  University of West Florida.  24 April 2014.  Web. 1 June 2014.

Rubric Design

Main navigation, articulating your assessment values.

Reading, commenting on, and then assigning a grade to a piece of student writing requires intense attention and difficult judgment calls. Some faculty dread “the stack.” Students may share the faculty’s dim view of writing assessment, perceiving it as highly subjective. They wonder why one faculty member values evidence and correctness before all else, while another seeks a vaguely defined originality.

Writing rubrics can help address the concerns of both faculty and students by making writing assessment more efficient, consistent, and public. Whether it is called a grading rubric, a grading sheet, or a scoring guide, a writing assignment rubric lists criteria by which the writing is graded.

Why create a writing rubric?

• It makes your tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit
• It articulates community- and discipline-specific standards of excellence
• It links the grade you give the assignment to the criteria
• It can make your grading more efficient, consistent, and fair as you can read and comment with your criteria in mind
• It can help you reverse engineer your course: once you have the rubrics created, you can align your readings, activities, and lectures with the rubrics to set your students up for success
• It can help your students produce writing that you look forward to reading

How to create a writing rubric

Create a rubric at the same time you create the assignment. It will help you explain to the students what your goals are for the assignment.

• Consider your purpose: do you need a rubric that addresses the standards for all the writing in the course? Or do you need to address the writing requirements and standards for just one assignment?  Task-specific rubrics are written to help teachers assess individual assignments or genres, whereas generic rubrics are written to help teachers assess multiple assignments.
• Begin by listing the important qualities of the writing that will be produced in response to a particular assignment. It may be helpful to have several examples of excellent versions of the assignment in front of you: what writing elements do they all have in common? Among other things, these may include features of the argument, such as a main claim or thesis; use and presentation of sources, including visuals; and formatting guidelines such as the requirement of a works cited.
• Then consider how the criteria will be weighted in grading. Perhaps all criteria are equally important, or perhaps there are two or three that all students must achieve to earn a passing grade. Decide what best fits the class and requirements of the assignment.

Consider involving students in Steps 2 and 3. A class session devoted to developing a rubric can provoke many important discussions about the ways the features of the language serve the purpose of the writing. And when students themselves work to describe the writing they are expected to produce, they are more likely to achieve it.

At this point, you will need to decide if you want to create a holistic or an analytic rubric. There is much debate about these two approaches to assessment.

Comparing Holistic and Analytic Rubrics

Holistic scoring .

Holistic scoring aims to rate overall proficiency in a given student writing sample. It is often used in large-scale writing program assessment and impromptu classroom writing for diagnostic purposes.

General tenets to holistic scoring:

• Responding to drafts is part of evaluation
• Responses do not focus on grammar and mechanics during drafting and there is little correction
• Marginal comments are kept to 2-3 per page with summative comments at end
• End commentary attends to students’ overall performance across learning objectives as articulated in the assignment
• Response language aims to foster students’ self-assessment

Holistic rubrics emphasize what students do well and generally increase efficiency; they may also be more valid because scoring includes authentic, personal reaction of the reader. But holistic sores won’t tell a student how they’ve progressed relative to previous assignments and may be rater-dependent, reducing reliability. (For a summary of advantages and disadvantages of holistic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 116.)

Here is an example of a partial holistic rubric:

Summary meets all the criteria. The writer understands the article thoroughly. The main points in the article appear in the summary with all main points proportionately developed. The summary should be as comprehensive as possible and should be as comprehensive as possible and should read smoothly, with appropriate transitions between ideas. Sentences should be clear, without vagueness or ambiguity and without grammatical or mechanical errors.

A complete holistic rubric for a research paper (authored by Jonah Willihnganz) can be  downloaded here.

Analytic Scoring

Analytic scoring makes explicit the contribution to the final grade of each element of writing. For example, an instructor may choose to give 30 points for an essay whose ideas are sufficiently complex, that marshals good reasons in support of a thesis, and whose argument is logical; and 20 points for well-constructed sentences and careful copy editing.

General tenets to analytic scoring:

• Reflect emphases in your teaching and communicate the learning goals for the course
• Emphasize student performance across criterion, which are established as central to the assignment in advance, usually on an assignment sheet
• Typically take a quantitative approach, providing a scaled set of points for each criterion
• Make the analytic framework available to students before they write  

Advantages of an analytic rubric include ease of training raters and improved reliability. Meanwhile, writers often can more easily diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their work. But analytic rubrics can be time-consuming to produce, and raters may judge the writing holistically anyway. Moreover, many readers believe that writing traits cannot be separated. (For a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of analytic scoring, see Becker, 2011, p. 115.)

For example, a partial analytic rubric for a single trait, “addresses a significant issue”:

• Excellent: Elegantly establishes the current problem, why it matters, to whom
• Above Average: Identifies the problem; explains why it matters and to whom
• Competent: Describes topic but relevance unclear or cursory
• Developing: Unclear issue and relevance

A  complete analytic rubric for a research paper can be downloaded here.  In WIM courses, this language should be revised to name specific disciplinary conventions.

Whichever type of rubric you write, your goal is to avoid pushing students into prescriptive formulas and limiting thinking (e.g., “each paragraph has five sentences”). By carefully describing the writing you want to read, you give students a clear target, and, as Ed White puts it, “describe the ongoing work of the class” (75).

Writing rubrics contribute meaningfully to the teaching of writing. Think of them as a coaching aide. In class and in conferences, you can use the language of the rubric to help you move past generic statements about what makes good writing good to statements about what constitutes success on the assignment and in the genre or discourse community. The rubric articulates what you are asking students to produce on the page; once that work is accomplished, you can turn your attention to explaining how students can achieve it.

Works Cited

Becker, Anthony.  “Examining Rubrics Used to Measure Writing Performance in U.S. Intensive English Programs.”   The CATESOL Journal  22.1 (2010/2011):113-30. Web.

White, Edward M.  Teaching and Assessing Writing . Proquest Info and Learning, 1985. Print.

Further Resources

CCCC Committee on Assessment. “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement.” November 2006 (Revised March 2009). Conference on College Composition and Communication. Web.

Gallagher, Chris W. “Assess Locally, Validate Globally: Heuristics for Validating Local Writing Assessments.” Writing Program Administration 34.1 (2010): 10-32. Web.

Huot, Brian.  (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning.  Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Kelly-Reilly, Diane, and Peggy O’Neil, eds. Journal of Writing Assessment. Web.

McKee, Heidi A., and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss DeVoss, Eds. Digital Writing Assessment & Evaluation. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2013. Web.

O’Neill, Peggy, Cindy Moore, and Brian Huot.  A Guide to College Writing Assessment . Logan: Utah State UP, 2009. Print.

Sommers, Nancy.  Responding to Student Writers . Macmillan Higher Education, 2013.

Straub, Richard. “Responding, Really Responding to Other Students’ Writing.” The Subject is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Boynton/Cook, 1999. Web.

White, Edward M., and Cassie A. Wright.  Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide . 5th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.

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Whenever we give feedback, it inevitably reflects our priorities and expectations about the assignment. In other words, we're using a rubric to choose which elements (e.g., right/wrong answer, work shown, thesis analysis, style, etc.) receive more or less feedback and what counts as a "good thesis" or a "less good thesis." When we evaluate student work, that is, we always have a rubric. The question is how consciously we’re applying it, whether we’re transparent with students about what it is, whether it’s aligned with what students are learning in our course, and whether we’re applying it consistently. The more we’re doing all of the following, the more consistent and equitable our feedback and grading will be:

Being conscious of your rubric ideally means having one written out, with explicit criteria and concrete features that describe more/less successful versions of each criterion. If you don't have a rubric written out, you can use this assignment prompt decoder for TFs & TAs to determine which elements and criteria should be the focus of your rubric.

Being transparent with students about your rubric means sharing it with them ahead of time and making sure they understand it. This assignment prompt decoder for students is designed to facilitate this discussion between students and instructors.

Aligning your rubric with your course means articulating the relationship between “this” assignment and the ones that scaffold up and build from it, which ideally involves giving students the chance to practice different elements of the assignment and get formative feedback before they’re asked to submit material that will be graded. For more ideas and advice on how this looks, see the " Formative Assignments " page at Gen Ed Writes.

Applying your rubric consistently means using a stable vocabulary when making your comments and keeping your feedback focused on the criteria in your rubric.

How to Build a Rubric

Rubrics and assignment prompts are two sides of a coin. If you’ve already created a prompt, you should have all of the information you need to make a rubric. Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way, and that itself turns out to be an advantage of making rubrics: it’s a great way to test whether your prompt is in fact communicating to students everything they need to know about the assignment they’ll be doing.

So what do students need to know? In general, assignment prompts boil down to a small number of common elements :

• Evidence and Analysis
• Style and Conventions
• Specific Guidelines
• Advice on Process

If an assignment prompt is clearly addressing each of these elements, then students know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and when/how/for whom they’re doing it. From the standpoint of a rubric, we can see how these elements correspond to the criteria for feedback:

All of these criteria can be weighed and given feedback, and they’re all things that students can be taught and given opportunities to practice. That makes them good criteria for a rubric, and that in turn is why they belong in every assignment prompt.

Which leaves “purpose” and “advice on process.” These elements are, in a sense, the heart and engine of any assignment, but their role in a rubric will differ from assignment to assignment. Here are a couple of ways to think about each.

On the one hand, “purpose” is the rationale for how the other elements are working in an assignment, and so feedback on them adds up to feedback on the skills students are learning vis-a-vis the overall purpose. In that sense, separately grading whether students have achieved an assignment’s “purpose” can be tricky.

On the other hand, metacognitive components such as journals or cover letters or artist statements are a great way for students to tie work on their assignment to the broader (often future-oriented) reasons why they’ve been doing the assignment. Making this kind of component a small part of the overall grade, e.g., 5% and/or part of “specific guidelines,” can allow it to be a nudge toward a meaningful self-reflection for students on what they’ve been learning and how it might build toward other assignments or experiences.

Advice on process

As with “purpose,” “advice on process” often amounts to helping students break down an assignment into the elements they’ll get feedback on. In that sense, feedback on those steps is often more informal or aimed at giving students practice with skills or components that will be parts of the bigger assignment.

For those reasons, though, the kind of feedback we give students on smaller steps has its own (even if ungraded) rubric. For example, if a prompt asks students to  propose a research question as part of the bigger project, they might get feedback on whether it can be answered by evidence, or whether it has a feasible scope, or who the audience for its findings might be. All of those criteria, in turn, could—and ideally would—later be part of the rubric for the graded project itself. Or perhaps students are submitting earlier, smaller components of an assignment for separate grades; or are expected to submit separate components all together at the end as a portfolio, perhaps together with a cover letter or artist statement .

Using Rubrics Effectively

In the same way that rubrics can facilitate the design phase of assignment, they can also facilitate the teaching and feedback phases, including of course grading. Here are a few ways this can work in a course:

Discuss the rubric ahead of time with your teaching team. Getting on the same page about what students will be doing and how different parts of the assignment fit together is, in effect, laying out what needs to happen in class and in section, both in terms of what students need to learn and practice, and how the coming days or weeks should be sequenced.

Share the rubric with your students ahead of time. For the same reason it's ideal for course heads to discuss rubrics with their teaching team, it’s ideal for the teaching team to discuss the rubric with students. Not only does the rubric lay out the different skills students will learn during an assignment and which skills are more or less important for that assignment,  it means that the formative feedback they get along the way is more legible as getting practice on elements of the “bigger assignment.” To be sure, this can’t always happen. Rubrics aren’t always up and running at the beginning of an assignment, and sometimes they emerge more inductively during the feedback and grading process, as instructors take stock of what students have actually submitted. In both cases, later is better than never—there’s no need to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Circulating a rubric at the time you return student work can still be a valuable tool to help students see the relationship between the learning objectives and goals of the assignment and the feedback and grade they’ve received.

Discuss the rubric with your teaching team during the grading process. If your assignment has a rubric, it’s important to make sure that everyone who will be grading is able to use the rubric consistently. Most rubrics aren’t exhaustive—see the note above on rubrics that are “too specific”—and a great way to see how different graders are handling “real-life” scenarios for an assignment is to have the entire team grade a few samples (including examples that seem more representative of an “A” or a “B”) and compare everyone’s approaches. We suggest scheduling a grade-norming session for your teaching staff.

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Assessment and Curriculum Support Center

Creating and using rubrics.

Last Updated: 4 March 2024. Click here to view archived versions of this page.

On this page:

• What is a rubric?
• Why use a rubric?
• What are the parts of a rubric?
• Developing a rubric
• Sample rubrics
• Scoring rubric group orientation and calibration
• Suggestions for using rubrics in courses
• Equity-minded considerations for rubric development
• Tips for developing a rubric
• Additional resources & sources consulted

Note:  The information and resources contained here serve only as a primers to the exciting and diverse perspectives in the field today. This page will be continually updated to reflect shared understandings of equity-minded theory and practice in learning assessment.

1. What is a rubric?

A rubric is an assessment tool often shaped like a matrix, which describes levels of achievement in a specific area of performance, understanding, or behavior.

There are two main types of rubrics:

Analytic Rubric : An analytic rubric specifies at least two characteristics to be assessed at each performance level and provides a separate score for each characteristic (e.g., a score on “formatting” and a score on “content development”).

• Advantages: provides more detailed feedback on student performance; promotes consistent scoring across students and between raters
• Disadvantages: more time consuming than applying a holistic rubric
• You want to see strengths and weaknesses.
• You want detailed feedback about student performance.

Holistic Rubric: A holistic rubrics provide a single score based on an overall impression of a student’s performance on a task.

• Advantages: quick scoring; provides an overview of student achievement; efficient for large group scoring
• Disadvantages: does not provided detailed information; not diagnostic; may be difficult for scorers to decide on one overall score
• You want a quick snapshot of achievement.
• A single dimension is adequate to define quality.

2. Why use a rubric?

• A rubric creates a common framework and language for assessment.
• Complex products or behaviors can be examined efficiently.
• Well-trained reviewers apply the same criteria and standards.
• Rubrics are criterion-referenced, rather than norm-referenced. Raters ask, “Did the student meet the criteria for level 5 of the rubric?” rather than “How well did this student do compared to other students?”
• Using rubrics can lead to substantive conversations among faculty.
• When faculty members collaborate to develop a rubric, it promotes shared expectations and grading practices.

Faculty members can use rubrics for program assessment. Examples:

The English Department collected essays from students in all sections of English 100. A random sample of essays was selected. A team of faculty members evaluated the essays by applying an analytic scoring rubric. Before applying the rubric, they “normed”–that is, they agreed on how to apply the rubric by scoring the same set of essays and discussing them until consensus was reached (see below: “6. Scoring rubric group orientation and calibration”). Biology laboratory instructors agreed to use a “Biology Lab Report Rubric” to grade students’ lab reports in all Biology lab sections, from 100- to 400-level. At the beginning of each semester, instructors met and discussed sample lab reports. They agreed on how to apply the rubric and their expectations for an “A,” “B,” “C,” etc., report in 100-level, 200-level, and 300- and 400-level lab sections. Every other year, a random sample of students’ lab reports are selected from 300- and 400-level sections. Each of those reports are then scored by a Biology professor. The score given by the course instructor is compared to the score given by the Biology professor. In addition, the scores are reported as part of the program’s assessment report. In this way, the program determines how well it is meeting its outcome, “Students will be able to write biology laboratory reports.”

3. What are the parts of a rubric?

Rubrics are composed of four basic parts. In its simplest form, the rubric includes:

• A task description . The outcome being assessed or instructions students received for an assignment.
• The characteristics to be rated (rows) . The skills, knowledge, and/or behavior to be demonstrated.
• Beginning, approaching, meeting, exceeding
• Emerging, developing, proficient, exemplary 
• Novice, intermediate, intermediate high, advanced 
• Beginning, striving, succeeding, soaring
• Also called a “performance description.” Explains what a student will have done to demonstrate they are at a given level of mastery for a given characteristic.

4. Developing a rubric

Step 1: Identify what you want to assess

Step 2: Identify the characteristics to be rated (rows). These are also called “dimensions.”

• Specify the skills, knowledge, and/or behaviors that you will be looking for.
• Limit the characteristics to those that are most important to the assessment.

Step 3: Identify the levels of mastery/scale (columns).

Tip: Aim for an even number (4 or 6) because when an odd number is used, the middle tends to become the “catch-all” category.

Step 4: Describe each level of mastery for each characteristic/dimension (cells).

• Describe the best work you could expect using these characteristics. This describes the top category.
• Describe an unacceptable product. This describes the lowest category.
• Develop descriptions of intermediate-level products for intermediate categories.

Important: Each description and each characteristic should be mutually exclusive.

Step 5: Test rubric.

• Apply the rubric to an assignment.
• Share with colleagues.

Tip: Faculty members often find it useful to establish the minimum score needed for the student work to be deemed passable. For example, faculty members may decided that a “1” or “2” on a 4-point scale (4=exemplary, 3=proficient, 2=marginal, 1=unacceptable), does not meet the minimum quality expectations. We encourage a standard setting session to set the score needed to meet expectations (also called a “cutscore”). Monica has posted materials from standard setting workshops, one offered on campus and the other at a national conference (includes speaker notes with the presentation slides). They may set their criteria for success as 90% of the students must score 3 or higher. If assessment study results fall short, action will need to be taken.

Step 6: Discuss with colleagues. Review feedback and revise.

Important: When developing a rubric for program assessment, enlist the help of colleagues. Rubrics promote shared expectations and consistent grading practices which benefit faculty members and students in the program.

5. Sample rubrics

Rubrics are on our Rubric Bank page and in our Rubric Repository (Graduate Degree Programs) . More are available at the Assessment and Curriculum Support Center in Crawford Hall (hard copy).

These open as Word documents and are examples from outside UH.

• Group Participation (analytic rubric)
• Participation (holistic rubric)
• Design Project (analytic rubric)
• Critical Thinking (analytic rubric)
• Media and Design Elements (analytic rubric; portfolio)
• Writing (holistic rubric; portfolio)

6. Scoring rubric group orientation and calibration

When using a rubric for program assessment purposes, faculty members apply the rubric to pieces of student work (e.g., reports, oral presentations, design projects). To produce dependable scores, each faculty member needs to interpret the rubric in the same way. The process of training faculty members to apply the rubric is called “norming.” It’s a way to calibrate the faculty members so that scores are accurate and consistent across the faculty. Below are directions for an assessment coordinator carrying out this process.

Suggested materials for a scoring session:

• Copies of the rubric
• Copies of the “anchors”: pieces of student work that illustrate each level of mastery. Suggestion: have 6 anchor pieces (2 low, 2 middle, 2 high)
• Score sheets
• Extra pens, tape, post-its, paper clips, stapler, rubber bands, etc.

Hold the scoring session in a room that:

• Allows the scorers to spread out as they rate the student pieces
• Has a chalk or white board, smart board, or flip chart
• Describe the purpose of the activity, stressing how it fits into program assessment plans. Explain that the purpose is to assess the program, not individual students or faculty, and describe ethical guidelines, including respect for confidentiality and privacy.
• Describe the nature of the products that will be reviewed, briefly summarizing how they were obtained.
• Describe the scoring rubric and its categories. Explain how it was developed.
• Analytic: Explain that readers should rate each dimension of an analytic rubric separately, and they should apply the criteria without concern for how often each score (level of mastery) is used. Holistic: Explain that readers should assign the score or level of mastery that best describes the whole piece; some aspects of the piece may not appear in that score and that is okay. They should apply the criteria without concern for how often each score is used.
• Give each scorer a copy of several student products that are exemplars of different levels of performance. Ask each scorer to independently apply the rubric to each of these products, writing their ratings on a scrap sheet of paper.
• Once everyone is done, collect everyone’s ratings and display them so everyone can see the degree of agreement. This is often done on a blackboard, with each person in turn announcing his/her ratings as they are entered on the board. Alternatively, the facilitator could ask raters to raise their hands when their rating category is announced, making the extent of agreement very clear to everyone and making it very easy to identify raters who routinely give unusually high or low ratings.
• Guide the group in a discussion of their ratings. There will be differences. This discussion is important to establish standards. Attempt to reach consensus on the most appropriate rating for each of the products being examined by inviting people who gave different ratings to explain their judgments. Raters should be encouraged to explain by making explicit references to the rubric. Usually consensus is possible, but sometimes a split decision is developed, e.g., the group may agree that a product is a “3-4” split because it has elements of both categories. This is usually not a problem. You might allow the group to revise the rubric to clarify its use but avoid allowing the group to drift away from the rubric and learning outcome(s) being assessed.
• Once the group is comfortable with how the rubric is applied, the rating begins. Explain how to record ratings using the score sheet and explain the procedures. Reviewers begin scoring.
• Are results sufficiently reliable?
• What do the results mean? Are we satisfied with the extent of students’ learning?
• Who needs to know the results?
• What are the implications of the results for curriculum, pedagogy, or student support services?
• How might the assessment process, itself, be improved?

7. Suggestions for using rubrics in courses

• Use the rubric to grade student work. Hand out the rubric with the assignment so students will know your expectations and how they’ll be graded. This should help students master your learning outcomes by guiding their work in appropriate directions.
• Use a rubric for grading student work and return the rubric with the grading on it. Faculty save time writing extensive comments; they just circle or highlight relevant segments of the rubric. Some faculty members include room for additional comments on the rubric page, either within each section or at the end.
• Develop a rubric with your students for an assignment or group project. Students can the monitor themselves and their peers using agreed-upon criteria that they helped develop. Many faculty members find that students will create higher standards for themselves than faculty members would impose on them.
• Have students apply your rubric to sample products before they create their own. Faculty members report that students are quite accurate when doing this, and this process should help them evaluate their own projects as they are being developed. The ability to evaluate, edit, and improve draft documents is an important skill.
• Have students exchange paper drafts and give peer feedback using the rubric. Then, give students a few days to revise before submitting the final draft to you. You might also require that they turn in the draft and peer-scored rubric with their final paper.
• Have students self-assess their products using the rubric and hand in their self-assessment with the product; then, faculty members and students can compare self- and faculty-generated evaluations.

8. Equity-minded considerations for rubric development

Ensure transparency by making rubric criteria public, explicit, and accessible

Transparency is a core tenet of equity-minded assessment practice. Students should know and understand how they are being evaluated as early as possible.

• Ensure the rubric is publicly available & easily accessible. We recommend publishing on your program or department website.
• Have course instructors introduce and use the program rubric in their own courses. Instructors should explain to students connections between the rubric criteria and the course and program SLOs.
• Write rubric criteria using student-focused and culturally-relevant language to ensure students understand the rubric’s purpose, the expectations it sets, and how criteria will be applied in assessing their work.
• For example, instructors can provide annotated examples of student work using the rubric language as a resource for students.

Meaningfully involve students and engage multiple perspectives

Rubrics created by faculty alone risk perpetuating unseen biases as the evaluation criteria used will inherently reflect faculty perspectives, values, and assumptions. Including students and other stakeholders in developing criteria helps to ensure performance expectations are aligned between faculty, students, and community members. Additional perspectives to be engaged might include community members, alumni, co-curricular faculty/staff, field supervisors, potential employers, or current professionals. Consider the following strategies to meaningfully involve students and engage multiple perspectives:

• Have students read each evaluation criteria and talk out loud about what they think it means. This will allow you to identify what language is clear and where there is still confusion.
• Ask students to use their language to interpret the rubric and provide a student version of the rubric.
• If you use this strategy, it is essential to create an inclusive environment where students and faculty have equal opportunity to provide input.
• Be sure to incorporate feedback from faculty and instructors who teach diverse courses, levels, and in different sub-disciplinary topics. Faculty and instructors who teach introductory courses have valuable experiences and perspectives that may differ from those who teach higher-level courses.
• Engage multiple perspectives including co-curricular faculty/staff, alumni, potential employers, and community members for feedback on evaluation criteria and rubric language. This will ensure evaluation criteria reflect what is important for all stakeholders.
• Elevate historically silenced voices in discussions on rubric development. Ensure stakeholders from historically underrepresented communities have their voices heard and valued.

Honor students’ strengths in performance descriptions

When describing students’ performance at different levels of mastery, use language that describes what students can do rather than what they cannot do. For example:

• Instead of: Students cannot make coherent arguments consistently.
• Use: Students can make coherent arguments occasionally.

9. Tips for developing a rubric

• Find and adapt an existing rubric! It is rare to find a rubric that is exactly right for your situation, but you can adapt an already existing rubric that has worked well for others and save a great deal of time. A faculty member in your program may already have a good one.
• Evaluate the rubric . Ask yourself: A) Does the rubric relate to the outcome(s) being assessed? (If yes, success!) B) Does it address anything extraneous? (If yes, delete.) C) Is the rubric useful, feasible, manageable, and practical? (If yes, find multiple ways to use the rubric: program assessment, assignment grading, peer review, student self assessment.)
• Collect samples of student work that exemplify each point on the scale or level. A rubric will not be meaningful to students or colleagues until the anchors/benchmarks/exemplars are available.
• Expect to revise.
• When you have a good rubric, SHARE IT!

10. Additional resources & sources consulted:

Rubric examples:

• Rubrics primarily for undergraduate outcomes and programs
• Rubric repository for graduate degree programs

Workshop presentation slides and handouts:

• Workshop handout (Word document)
• How to Use a Rubric for Program Assessment (2010)
• Techniques for Using Rubrics in Program Assessment by guest speaker Dannelle Stevens (2010)
• Rubrics: Save Grading Time & Engage Students in Learning by guest speaker Dannelle Stevens (2009)
• Rubric Library , Institutional Research, Assessment & Planning, California State University-Fresno
• The Basics of Rubrics [PDF], Schreyer Institute, Penn State
• Creating Rubrics , Teaching Methods and Management, TeacherVision
• Allen, Mary – University of Hawai’i at Manoa Spring 2008 Assessment Workshops, May 13-14, 2008 [available at the Assessment and Curriculum Support Center]
• Mertler, Craig A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation , 7(25).
• NPEC Sourcebook on Assessment: Definitions and Assessment Methods for Communication, Leadership, Information Literacy, Quantitative Reasoning, and Quantitative Skills . [PDF] (June 2005)

Analytic rubric design fundamentals

A beginner’s guide to creating an analytic rubric which can be used by tutors to accurately mark and feedback on assignments, but also by students themselves to guide their work

Jamie Gilbert Mikell

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Rubrics comprise a critical part of assessment and evaluation in college courses. Regardless of course delivery format, rubrics are a tool to provide meaningful and measurable feedback to students . Rubrics help educators to define criteria by which to evaluate specific assignments, projects and other course completion standards. Communicating expectations to students via rubric scoring and feedback allows students to summarise critical components of standards for achievement before and after an assignment. When rubrics are presented alongside assignments, research shows that students use the rubrics as guidance and successful assignment completion.

For this guide, we will focus on the analytic rubric. An analytic rubric conveys levels of performance for different criteria that make up an assignment. Analytic rubrics compartmentalise the assignment criteria for independent evaluation, providing multidimensional and specific feedback to assess student performance on each of these focus areas.

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Before designing an analytic rubric, teaching faculty need to be aware of essential rubric components alongside the evaluation criteria for each assignment. Here, I will discuss developing an analytical rubric by focusing on evaluation criteria, rating scales and task descriptors.

The first step to analytic rubric creation is to define the goal and purpose of the assignment that is being evaluated. Referring to course outcomes and the assignment’s alignment to specific outcomes is a good place to start. Designing an effective rubric ensures that the criteria and expectations are clearly defined and directly aligned with course outcomes.

Evaluation criteria: An excellent starting point is clearly defining essential skills or concepts that students should know or be able to do upon successful assignment completion. Instructors should define the complexity of knowledge needed to exhibit an aptitude for each criterion.

• Evaluation criteria will vary from assignment to assignment. For example, an individual student presentation may be broken into the following criteria: presentation organisation, subject knowledge, use of visual aids, mechanics, eye contact and presentation delivery. Whereas criteria for a student essay may be broken into criteria including opening thesis statement, relevance to the topic, subject knowledge, closure statement and mechanics.
• When choosing appropriate evaluation criteria, the instructor should consider the assignment’s primary focus (to ascertain topic knowledge, focus on presentation skills or design skills?) and its weight towards the final grade.
• Evaluation criteria should be stated concisely and serve to be viewed as an overall topic.
• Specific detail for each criterion level is outlined in the task descriptors (see below).
• It is critical for instructors to remember that each evaluation criteria may be weighted differently based on comparative importance towards the assignment goals. If the assignment’s primary goal is to improve students’ presentation skills, presentation-based evaluation criteria may be weighted more heavily than criteria for incorporating a written reflection.

Figure 1 below shows the evaluation criteria in the boxes in the left-hand column in light grey: School Integration; Addressing Gaps; Health Integration; Grammar and Mechanics.

Rating scales: After the evaluation criteria are defined clearly, describe the rating scale to distinguish performance levels from one another for each evaluation criteria. When linked to a numerically graded assignment, it is common for instructors to use numerical rating scales.

• Consider limiting the rating scale to three to five criteria, with clear labels for each.
• Mindful word choice for rating scale labels is essential for instructors to convey clear expectations for success.
• It is critical to avoid overly negative or ambiguous labelling, and to incorporate labels that convey student levels of achievement. See the rating scales above titled proficient, satisfactory  and needs work . Each scale conveys the level of student performance and the appropriate range of potential points tied to each.
• Rating scale point ranges will vary from assignment to assignment. See the figure above and note that the student must earn five points for proficient consideration.
• Rating scale point ranges may differ based on the assignment type and the number of evaluation criteria.

In Figure 1, the rating scales can be seen in the boxes in top row in pink: “Proficient (5 points), Satisfactory (3-4 points) and Needs Work (0-2 points).

Task descriptors: Task descriptors define achievement levels – what students must achieve or demonstrate for each evaluation criterion. Task descriptors should be conveyed in sentence form, vary by rating scale, and clearly outline expectations for achievement.

• Expectations for each task descriptor should be listed in detail, and each descriptor should be clearly differentiated from the descriptor in the level above or below.
• They should measure progress towards mastery of the evaluation criteria and be realistic and relevant.
• When creating task descriptors, consider the top-tier evaluation criteria first. It is beneficial to begin by defining the task descriptor for maximum points and then consider what components of that descriptor must be present or absent to fit into the lower rating scale categories.
• The instructor should consider clearly defined task descriptors criteria to minimise subjectivity while allowing students space to exhibit creativity and individuality.

In Figure 1, the task descriptors can be found in the light pink directly underneath the first row and to the right of the first column.

It is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all way to design rubrics. Most importantly, it is critical to remember that when presented alongside an assignment, research shows that students tend to use rubrics as guidance towards successful assignment completion.

Jamie Gilbert Mikell is an a ssistant professor of kinesiology, health and physical education at Athens State University.

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iRubric: Analytical Essay rubric

• Compare/Contrast essay, rubric, writing components

Essay Rubric: Basic Guidelines and Sample Template

11 December 2023

last updated

Lectures and tutors provide specific requirements for students to meet when writing essays. Basically, an essay rubric helps tutors to analyze the quality of articles written by students. In this case, useful rubrics make the analysis process simple for lecturers as they focus on specific concepts related to the writing process. Also, an essay rubric list and organize all of the criteria into one convenient paper. In other instances, students use an essay rubric to enhance their writing skills by examining various requirements. Then, different types of essay rubrics vary from one educational level to another. For example, Master’s and Ph.D. essay rubrics focus on examining complex thesis statements and other writing mechanics. However, high school essay rubrics examine basic writing concepts. In turn, a sample template of a high school rubric in this article can help students to evaluate their papers before submitting them to their teachers.

General Aspects of an Essay Rubric

An essay rubric refers to the way how teachers assess student’s composition writing skills and abilities. Basically, an essay rubric provides specific criteria to grade assignments. In this case, teachers use essay rubrics to save time when evaluating and grading various papers. Hence, learners must use an essay rubric effectively to achieve desired goals and grades.

General Assessment Table for an Essay Rubric

1. organization.

Excellent/8 points: The essay contains stiff topic sentences and a controlled organization.

Very Good/6 points: The essay contains a logical and appropriate organization. The writer uses clear topic sentences.

Average/4 points: The essay contains a logical and appropriate organization. The writer uses clear topic sentences.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The essay has an inconsistent organization.

Unacceptable/0 points: The essay shows the absence of a planned organization.

Grade: ___ .

Excellent/8 points: The essay shows the absence of a planned organization.

Very Good/6 points: The paper contains precise and varied sentence structures and word choices. 

Average/4 points: The paper follows a limited but mostly correct sentence structure. There are different sentence structures and word choices.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The paper contains several awkward and unclear sentences. There are some problems with word choices.

Unacceptable/0 points: The writer does not contain apparent control over sentence structures and word choice.

Excellent/8 points: The content appears sophisticated and contains well-developed ideas.

Very Good/6 points: The essay content appears illustrative and balanced.

Average/4 points: The essay contains unbalanced content that requires more analysis.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The essay contains a lot of research information without analysis or commentary.

Unacceptable/0 points: The essay lacks relevant content and does not fit the thesis statement . Essay rubric rules are not followed.

Excellent/8 points: The essay contains a clearly stated and focused thesis statement.

Very Good/6 points: The written piece comprises a clearly stated argument. However, the focus would have been sharper.

Average/4 points: The thesis phrasing sounds simple and lacks complexity. The writer does not word the thesis correctly. 

Needs Improvement/2 points: The thesis statement requires a clear objective and does not fit the theme in the content of the essay.

Unacceptable/0 points: The thesis is not evident in the introduction.

Excellent/8 points: The essay is clear and focused. The work holds the reader’s attention. Besides, the relevant details and quotes enrich the thesis statement.

Very Good/6 points: The essay is mostly focused and contains a few useful details and quotes.

Average/4 points: The writer begins the work by defining the topic. However, the development of ideas appears general.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The author fails to define the topic well, or the writer focuses on several issues.

Unacceptable/0 points: The essay lacks a clear sense of a purpose or thesis statement. Readers have to make suggestions based on sketchy or missing ideas to understand the intended meaning. Essay rubric requirements are missed.

6. Sentence Fluency

Excellent/8 points: The essay has a natural flow, rhythm, and cadence. The sentences are well built and have a wide-ranging and robust structure that enhances reading.

Very Good/6 points: The ideas mostly flow and motivate a compelling reading.

Average/4 points: The text hums along with a balanced beat but tends to be more businesslike than musical. Besides, the flow of ideas tends to become more mechanical than fluid.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The essay appears irregular and hard to read.

Unacceptable/0 points: Readers have to go through the essay several times to give this paper a fair interpretive reading.

7. Conventions

Excellent/8 points: The student demonstrates proper use of standard writing conventions, like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, usage, and paragraphing. The student uses protocols in a way that improves the readability of the essay.

Very Good/6 points: The student demonstrates proper writing conventions and uses them correctly. One can read the essay with ease, and errors are rare. Few touch-ups can make the composition ready for publishing.

Average/4 points: The writer shows reasonable control over a short range of standard writing rules. The writer handles all the conventions and enhances readability. The errors in the essay tend to distract and impair legibility.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The writer makes an effort to use various conventions, including spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar usage, and paragraphing. The essay contains multiple errors.

Unacceptable/0 points: The author makes repetitive errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, usage, and paragraphing. Some mistakes distract readers and make it hard to understand the concepts. Essay rubric rules are not covered.

8. Presentation

Excellent/8 points: The form and presentation of the text enhance the readability of the essay and the flow of ideas.

Very Good/6 points: The format has few mistakes and is easy to read.

Average/4 points: The writer’s message is understandable in this format.

Needs Improvement/2 points: The writer’s message is only comprehensible infrequently, and the paper appears disorganized.

Unacceptable/0 points: Readers receive a distorted message due to difficulties connecting to the presentation of the text.

Final Grade: ___ .

Grading Scheme for an Essay Rubric:

• A+ = 60+ points
• A = 55-59 points
• A- = 50-54 points
• B+ = 45-49 points
• B = 40-44 points
• B- = 35-39 points
• C+ = 30-34 points
• C = 25-29 points
• C- = 20-24 points
• D = 10-19 points
• F = less than 9 points

Basic Differences in Education Levels and Essay Rubrics

The quality of essays changes at different education levels. For instance, college students must write miscellaneous papers when compared to high school learners. In this case, an essay rubric will change for these different education levels. For example, university and college essays should have a debatable thesis statement with varying points of view. However, high school essays should have simple phrases as thesis statements. Then, other requirements in an essay rubric will be more straightforward for high school students. For master’s and Ph.D. essays, the criteria presented in an essay rubric should focus on examining the paper’s complexity. In turn, compositions for these two categories should have thesis statements that demonstrate a detailed analysis of defined topics that advance knowledge in a specific area of study.

Summing Up on an Essay Rubric

Essay rubrics help teachers, instructors, professors, and tutors to analyze the quality of essays written by students. Basically, an essay rubric makes the analysis process simple for lecturers. Essay rubrics list and organize all of the criteria into one convenient paper. In other instances, students use the essay rubrics to improve their writing skills. However, they vary from one educational level to the other. Master’s and Ph.D. essay rubrics focus on examining complex thesis statements and other writing mechanics. However, high school essay rubrics examine basic writing concepts.  The following are some of the tips that one must consider when preparing a rubric.

• contain all writing mechanics that relates to essay writing;
• cover different requirements and their relevant grades;
• follow clear and understandable statements.

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What is an Analytic Rubric?

What is an analytic rubric? As teachers, we often ask ourselves – what is the best way to assess students?

In many cases, analytic rubrics are the most comprehensive way to assess students. While holistic rubrics and other informal assessments are great tools for smaller assignments,  when it comes to large projects – nothing beats an analytic rubric.

In this post, we are going to break down everything you need to know to answer other teachers when they ask: what is an analytic rubric?

An analytic rubric is a style of assessment where the student is being assessed through individual criteria. That said, it’s best when these criteria work together.

For example, in an essay rubric, you might have four or five assessment criteria that are assessed independently. These independent criteria are then collectively tallied up at the end to create a comprehensive grade.

Analytic rubrics are very accurate and provide a detailed assessment that helps students to better understand their grades. 

The five assessment criteria for our journal entry rubric are content and clarity, structure and organization, detail and voice, use of language and conventions, and word choice.

While on the surface it may seem like this is  a lot for a simple journal entry, providing a rubric like this to students help them to better formulate ideas and understand how they are being assessed.

In fact, our case studies showed that students graded with our analytic rubrics scored on average 17% higher than those assessed without a rubric.

Benefits of Using Analytical Rubrics

Now that we have a better understanding of how to answer someone when they ask what an analytic rubric let’s take a closer look at the benefits of using analytic rubrics.

1. Saves Teachers Time

Using analytic rubrics save time because every student can be assessed based on their strength and needs. Using a pre-built analytic rubric like those in our library saves you time scouring the web for resources.

2. Makes Assessment Simple

Assessment can be very complicated, but with pre-built analytic rubrics – student assessment is simple again. Teach away knowing that your students have an accurate and reliable form of being graded.

3. Analytic Rubrics are Very Accurate

Due to the comprehensive nature of using multiple evaluation criteria, analytic rubrics are very accurate. The subjective nature of simply scoring a student out of 10 is absent in this process.

4. Students Better Understand the Grade

This is a big one. When students understand  how they are being scored, it leaves more room for student growth. This means students are not just concerned with the final grade, but also the process of improving the grade in the future.

5. Analytic Rubrics are Great Tracking Tools

Whether you are planning a transition for a student into another course, or you are communicating grades to parents at a conference, having analytic rubrics saved for each student helps everyone to track ongoing progress.

Interesting in getting started using our SUPERRUBRIC builder? Get started for free using the link below.

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ACT Writing

What time is it? It's essay time! In this article, I'm going to get into the details of the newly transformed ACT Writing by discussing the ACT essay rubric and how the essay is graded based on that. You'll learn what each item on the rubric means for your essay writing and what you need to do to meet those requirements.

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ACT Essay Grading: The Basics

If you've chosen to take the ACT Plus Writing , you'll have 40 minutes to write an essay (after completing the English, Math, Reading, and Science sections of the ACT, of course). Your essay will be evaluated by two graders , who score your essay from 1-6 on each of 4 domains, leading to scores out of 12 for each domain. Your Writing score is calculated by averaging your four domain scores, leading to a total ACT Writing score from 2-12.

NOTE : From September 2015 to June 2016, ACT Writing scores were calculated by adding together your domain scores and scaling to a score of 1-36; the change to an averaged 2-12 ACT Writing score was announced June 28, 2016 and put into action September 2016.

The Complete ACT Grading Rubric

Based on ACT, Inc's stated grading criteria, I've gathered all the relevant essay-grading criteria into a chart. The information itself is available on the ACT's website , and there's more general information about each of the domains here . The columns in this rubric are titled as per the ACT's own domain areas, with the addition of another category that I named ("Mastery Level").

ACT Writing Rubric: Item-by-Item Breakdown

Whew. That rubric might be a little overwhelming—there's so much information to process! Below, I've broken down the essay rubric by domain, with examples of what a 3- and a 6-scoring essay might look like.

Ideas and Analysis

The Ideas and Analysis domain is the rubric area most intimately linked with the basic ACT essay task itself. Here's what the ACT website has to say about this domain:

Scores in this domain reflect the ability to generate productive ideas and engage critically with multiple perspectives on the given issue. Competent writers understand the issue they are invited to address, the purpose for writing, and the audience. They generate ideas that are relevant to the situation.

Based on this description, I've extracted the three key things you need to do in your essay to score well in the Ideas and Analysis domain.

#1: Choose a perspective on this issue and state it clearly. #2: Compare at least one other perspective to the perspective you have chosen. #3: Demonstrate understanding of the ways the perspectives relate to one another. #4: Analyze the implications of each perspective you choose to discuss.

There's no cool acronym, sorry. I guess a case could be made for "ACCE," but I wanted to list the points in the order of importance, so "CEAC" it is.

Fortunately, the ACT Writing Test provides you with the three perspectives to analyze and choose from, which will save you some of the time of "generating productive ideas." In addition, "analyzing each perspective" does not mean that you need to argue from each of the points of view. Instead, you need to choose one perspective to argue as your own and explain how your point of view relates to at least one other perspective by evaluating how correct the perspectives you discuss are and analyzing the implications of each perspective.

Note: While it is technically allowable for you to come up with a fourth perspective as your own and to then discuss that point of view in relation to another perspective, we do not recommend it. 40 minutes is already a pretty short time to discuss and compare multiple points of view in a thorough and coherent manner—coming up with new, clearly-articulated perspectives takes time that could be better spend devising a thorough analysis of the relationship between multiple perspectives.

To get deeper into what things fall in the Ideas and Analysis domain, I'll use a sample ACT Writing prompt and the three perspectives provided:

Many of the goods and services we depend on daily are now supplied by intelligent, automated machines rather than human beings. Robots build cars and other goods on assembly lines, where once there were human workers. Many of our phone conversations are now conducted not with people but with sophisticated technologies. We can now buy goods at a variety of stores without the help of a human cashier. Automation is generally seen as a sign of progress, but what is lost when we replace humans with machines? Given the accelerating variety and prevalence of intelligent machines, it is worth examining the implications and meaning of their presence in our lives.

Perspective One : What we lose with the replacement of people by machines is some part of our own humanity. Even our mundane daily encounters no longer require from us basic courtesy, respect, and tolerance for other people.

Perspective Two : Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs, and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases they work better than humans. This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone.

Perspective Three : Intelligent machines challenge our long-standing ideas about what humans are or can be. This is good because it pushes both humans and machines toward new, unimagined possibilities.

First, in order to "clearly state your own perspective on the issue," you need to figure out what your point of view, or perspective, on this issue is going to be. For the sake of argument, let's say that you agree the most with the second perspective. A essay that scores a 3 in this domain might simply restate this perspective:

I agree that machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs, and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases they work better than humans. This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone.

In contrast, an essay scoring a 6 in this domain would likely have a more complex point of view (with what the rubric calls "nuance and precision in thought and purpose"):

Machines will never be able to replace humans entirely, as creativity is not something that can be mechanized. Because machines can perform delicate and repetitive tasks with precision, however, they are able to take over for humans with regards to low-skill, repetitive jobs and high-skill, extremely precise jobs. This then frees up humans to do what we do best—think, create, and move the world forward.

Next, you must compare at least one other perspective to your perspective throughout your essay, including in your initial argument. Here's what a 3-scoring essay's argument would look like:

I agree that machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs, and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases they work better than humans. This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone. Machines do not cause us to lose our humanity or challenge our long-standing ideas about what humans are or can be.

And here, in contrast, is what a 6-scoring essay's argument (that includes multiple perspectives) would look like:

Machines will never be able to replace humans entirely, as creativity is not something that can be mechanized, which means that our humanity is safe. Because machines can perform delicate and repetitive tasks with precision, however, they are able to take over for humans with regards to low-skill, repetitive jobs and high-skill, extremely precise jobs. Rather than forcing us to challenge our ideas about what humans are or could be, machines simply allow us to BE, without distractions. This then frees up humans to do what we do best—think, create, and move the world forward.

You also need to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the way in which the two perspectives relate to each other. A 3-scoring essay in this domain would likely be absolute, stating that Perspective Two is completely correct, while the other two perspectives are absolutely incorrect. By contrast, a 6-scoring essay in this domain would provide a more insightful context within which to consider the issue:

In the future, machines might lead us to lose our humanity; alternatively, machines might lead us to unimaginable pinnacles of achievement. I would argue, however, projecting possible futures does not make them true, and that the evidence we have at present supports the perspective that machines are, above all else, efficient and effective completing repetitive and precise tasks.

Finally, to analyze the perspectives, you need to consider each aspect of each perspective. In the case of Perspective Two, this means you must discuss that machines are good at two types of jobs, that they're better than humans at both types of jobs, and that their efficiency creates a better world. The analysis in a 3-scoring essay is usually "simplistic or somewhat unclear." By contrast, the analysis of a 6-scoring essay "examines implications, complexities and tensions, and/or underlying values and assumptions."

• Choose a perspective that you can support.
• Compare at least one other perspective to the perspective you have chosen.
• Demonstrate understanding of the ways the perspectives relate to one another.
• Analyze the implications of each perspective you choose to discuss.

To score well on the ACT essay overall, however, it's not enough to just state your opinions about each part of the perspective; you need to actually back up your claims with evidence to develop your own point of view. This leads straight into the next domain: Development and Support.

Development and Support

Another important component of your essay is that you explain your thinking. While it's obviously important to clearly state what your ideas are in the first place, the ACT essay requires you to demonstrate evidence-based reasoning. As per the description on ACT.org [bolding mine]:

Scores in this domain reflect the ability to discuss ideas, offer rationale, and bolster an argument. Competent writers explain and explore their ideas, discuss implications, and illustrate through examples . They help the reader understand their thinking about the issue.

"Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs, and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases they work better than humans. This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone."

In your essay, you might start out by copying the perspective directly into your essay as your point of view, which is fine for the Ideas and Analysis domain. To score well in the Development and Support domain and develop your point of view with logical reasoning and detailed examples, however, you're going to have to come up with reasons for why you agree with this perspective and examples that support your thinking.

Here's an example from an essay that would score a 3 in this domain:

Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases, they work better than humans. For example, machines are better at printing things quickly and clearly than people are. Prior to the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg people had to write everything by hand. The printing press made it faster and easier to get things printed because things didn't have to be written by hand all the time. In the world today we have even better machines like laser printers that print things quickly.

Essays scoring a 3 in this domain tend to have relatively simple development and tend to be overly general, with imprecise or repetitive reasoning or illustration. Contrast this with an example from an essay that would score a 6:

Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases, they work better than humans. Take, for instance, the example of printing. As a composer, I need to be able to create many copies of my sheet music to give to my musicians. If I were to copy out each part by hand, it would take days, and would most likely contain inaccuracies. On the other hand, my printer (a machine) is able to print out multiple copies of parts with extreme precision. If it turns out I made an error when I was entering in the sheet music onto the computer (another machine), I can easily correct this error and print out more copies quickly.

The above example of the importance of machines to composers uses "an integrated line of skillful reasoning and illustration" to support my claim ("Machines are good at low-skill, repetitive jobs and at high-speed, extremely precise jobs. In both cases, they work better than humans"). To develop this example further (and incorporate the "This efficiency leads to a more prosperous and progressive world for everyone" facet of the perspective), I would need to expand my example to explain why it's so important that multiple copies of precisely replicated documents be available, and how this affects the world.

World Map - Abstract Acrylic by Nicolas Raymond , used under CC BY 2.0 /Resized from original.

Organization

Essay organization has always been integral to doing well on the ACT essay, so it makes sense that the ACT Writing rubric has an entire domain devoted to this. The organization of your essay refers not just to the order in which you present your ideas in the essay, but also to the order in which you present your ideas in each paragraph. Here's the formal description from the ACT website :

Scores in this domain reflect the ability to organize ideas with clarity and purpose. Organizational choices are integral to effective writing. Competent writers arrange their essay in a way that clearly shows the relationship between ideas, and they guide the reader through their discussion.

Making sure your essay is logically organized relates back to the "development" part of the previous domain. As the above description states, you can't just throw examples and information into your essay willy-nilly, without any regard for the order; part of constructing and developing a convincing argument is making sure it flows logically. A lot of this organization should happen while you are in the planning phase, before you even begin to write your essay.

Let's go back to the machine intelligence essay example again. I've decided to argue for Perspective Two, which is:

An essay that scores a 3 in this domain would show a "basic organizational structure," which is to say that each perspective analyzed would be discussed in its own paragraph, "with most ideas logically grouped." A possible organization for a 3-scoring essay:

An essay that scores a 6 in this domain, on the other hand, has a lot more to accomplish. The "controlling idea or purpose" behind the essay should be clearly expressed in every paragraph, and ideas should be ordered in a logical fashion so that there is a clear progression from the beginning to the end. Here's a possible organization for a 6-scoring essay:

In this example, the unifying idea is that machines are helpful (and it's mentioned in each paragraph) and the progression of ideas makes more sense. This is certainly not the only way to organize an essay on this particular topic, or even using this particular perspective. Your essay does, however, have to be organized, rather than consist of a bunch of ideas thrown together.

Here are my Top 5 ACT Writing Organization Rules to follow:

#1: Be sure to include an introduction (with your thesis stating your point of view), paragraphs in which you make your case, and a conclusion that sums up your argument

#2: When planning your essay, make sure to present your ideas in an order that makes sense (and follows a logical progression that will be easy for the grader to follow).

#3: Make sure that you unify your essay with one main idea . Do not switch arguments partway through your essay.

#4: Don't write everything in one huge paragraph. If you're worried you're going to run out of space to write and can't make your handwriting any smaller and still legible, you can try using a paragraph symbol, ¶, at the beginning of each paragraph as a last resort to show the organization of your essay.

#5: Use transitions between paragraphs (usually the last line of the previous paragraph and the first line of the paragraph) to "strengthen the relationships among ideas" ( source ). This means going above and beyond "First of all...Second...Lastly" at the beginning of each paragraph. Instead, use the transitions between paragraphs as an opportunity to describe how that paragraph relates to your main argument.

Language Use

The final domain on the ACT Writing rubric is Language Use and Conventions. This the item that includes grammar, punctuation, and general sentence structure issues. Here's what the ACT website has to say about Language Use:

Scores in this domain reflect the ability to use written language to convey arguments with clarity. Competent writers make use of the conventions of grammar, syntax, word usage, and mechanics. They are also aware of their audience and adjust the style and tone of their writing to communicate effectively.

I tend to think of this as the "be a good writer" category, since many of the standards covered in the above description are ones that good writers will automatically meet in their writing. On the other hand, this is probably the area non-native English speakers will struggle the most, as you must have a fairly solid grasp of English to score above a 2 on this domain. The good news is that by reading this article, you're already one step closer to improving your "Language Use" on ACT Writing.

There are three main parts of this domain:

#1: Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics #2: Sentence Structure #3: Vocabulary and Word Choice

I've listed them (and will cover them) from lowest to highest level. If you're struggling with multiple areas, I highly recommend starting out with the lowest-level issue, as the components tend to build on each other. For instance, if you're struggling with grammar and usage, you need to focus on fixing that before you start to think about precision of vocabulary/word choice.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics

At the most basic level, you need to be able to "effectively communicate your ideas in standard written English" ( ACT.org ). First and foremost, this means that your grammar and punctuation need to be correct. On ACT Writing, it's all right to make a few minor errors if the meaning is clear, even on essays that score a 6 in the Language Use domain; however, the more errors you make, the more your score will drop.

Here's an example from an essay that scored a 3 in Language Use:

Machines are good at doing there jobs quickly and precisely. Also because machines aren't human or self-aware they don't get bored so they can do the same thing over & over again without getting worse.

While the meaning of the sentences is clear, there are several errors: the first sentence uses "there" instead of "their," the second sentence is a run-on sentence, and the second sentence also uses the abbreviation "&" in place of "and." Now take a look at an example from a 6-scoring essay:

Machines excel at performing their jobs both quickly and precisely. In addition, since machines are not self-aware they are unable to get "bored." This means that they can perform the same task over and over without a decrease in quality.

This example solves the abbreviation and "there/their" issue. The second sentence is missing a comma (after "self-aware"), but the worse of the run-on sentence issue is absent.

Our Complete Guide to ACT Grammar might be helpful if you just need a general refresh on grammar rules. In addition, we have several articles that focus in on specific grammar rules, as they are tested on ACT English; while the specific ways in which ACT English tests you on these rules isn't something you'll need to know for the essay, the explanations of the grammar rules themselves are quite helpful.

Sentence Structure

Once you've gotten down basic grammar, usage, and mechanics, you can turn your attention to sentence structure. Here's an example of what a 3-scoring essay in Language Use (based on sentence structure alone) might look like:

Machines are more efficient than humans at many tasks. Machines are not causing us to lose our humanity. Instead, machines help us to be human by making things more efficient so that we can, for example, feed the needy with technological advances.

The sentence structures in the above example are not particularly varied (two sentences in a row start with "Machines are"), and the last sentence has a very complicated/convoluted structure, which makes it hard to understand. For comparison, here's a 6-scoring essay:

Machines are more efficient than humans at many tasks, but that does not mean that machines are causing us to lose our humanity. In fact, machines may even assist us in maintaining our humanity by providing more effective and efficient ways to feed the needy.

For whatever reason, I find that when I'm under time pressure, my sentences maintain variety in their structures but end up getting really awkward and strange. A real life example: once I described a method of counteracting dementia as "supporting persons of the elderly persuasion" during a hastily written psychology paper. I've found the best ways to counteract this are as follows:

#1: Look over what you've written and change any weird wordings that you notice.

#2: If you're just writing a practice essay, get a friend/teacher/relative who is good at writing (in English) to look over what you've written and point out issues (this is how my own awkward wording was caught before I handed in the paper). This point obviously does not apply when you're actually taking the ACT, but it very helpful to ask for someone else to take a look over any practice essays you write to point out issues you may not notice yourself.

Vocabulary and Word Choice

The icing on the "Language Use" domain cake is skilled use of vocabulary and correct word choice. Part of this means using more complicated vocabulary in your essay. Once more, look at this this example from a 3-scoring essay (spelling corrected):

Machines are good at doing their jobs quickly and precisely.

Compare that to this sentence from a 6-scoring essay:

Machines excel at performing their jobs both quickly and precisely.

The 6-scoring essay uses "excel" and "performing" in place of "are good at" and "doing." This is an example of using language that is both more skillful ("excel" is more advanced than "are good at") and more precise ("performing" is a more precise word than "doing"). It's important to make sure that, when you do use more advanced words, you use them correctly. Consider the below sentence:

"Machines are often instrumental in ramifying safety features."

The sentence uses a couple of advanced vocabulary words, but since "ramifying" is used incorrectly, the language use in this sentence is neither skillful nor precise. Above all, your word choice and vocabulary should make your ideas clearer, not make them harder to understand.

untitled is also an adjective by Procsilas Moscas , used under CC BY 2.0 /Resized and cropped from original.

How Do I Use the ACT Writing Grading Rubric?

Okay, we've taken a look at the ACTual ACT Writing grading rubric and gone over each domain in detail. To finish up, I'll go over a couple of ways the scoring rubric can be useful to you in your ACT essay prep.

Use the ACT Writing Rubric To...Shape Your Essays

Now that you know what the ACT is looking for in an essay, you can use that to guide what you write about in your essays...and how develop and organize what you say!

Because I'm an Old™ (not actually trademarked), and because I'm from the East Coast, I didn't really know much about the ACT prior to starting my job at PrepScholar. People didn't really take it in my high school, so when I looked at the grading rubric for the first time, I was shocked to see how different the ACT essay was (as compared to the more familiar SAT essay ).

Basically, by reading this article, you're already doing better than high school me.

An artist's impression of L. Staffaroni, age 16 (look, junior year was/is hard for everyone).

Use the ACT Writing Rubric To...Grade Your Practice Essays

The ACT can't really give you an answer key to the essay the way it can give you an answer key to the other sections (Reading, Math, etc). There are some examples of essays at each score point on the ACT website , but these examples assume that students will be at an equal level in each of domains, which will not necessarily be true for you. Even if a sample essay is provided as part of a practice test answer key, it will probably use different context, have a different logical progression, or maybe even argue a different viewpoint.

The ACT Writing rubric is the next best thing to an essay answer key. Use it as a filter through which to view your essay . Naturally, you don't have the time to become an expert at applying the rubric criteria to your essay to make sure you're in line with the ACT's grading principles and standards. That is not your job. Your job is to write the best essay that you can. If you're not confident in your ability to spot grammar, usage, and mechanics issues, I highly recommend asking a friend, teacher, or family member who is really good at (English) writing to take a look over your practice essays and point out the mistakes.

If you really want custom feedback on your practice essays from experienced essay graders, may I also suggest the PrepScholar test prep platform ? As I manage all essay grading, I happen to know a bit about the essay part of this platform, which provides you with both an essay grade and custom feedback. Learn more about PrepScholar ACT Prep and our essay grading here!

What's Next?

Desirous of some more sweet sweet ACT essay articles? Why not start with our comprehensive guide to the ACT Writing test and how to write an ACT essay, step-by-step ? (Trick question: obviously you should do this.)

Round out your dive into the details of the ACT Writing test with tips and strategies to raise your essay score , information about the best ACT Writing template , and advice on how to get a perfect score on the ACT essay .

Want actual feedback on your essay? Then consider signing up for our PrepScholar test prep platform . Included in the platform are practice tests and practice essays graded by experts here at PrepScholar.

Want to improve your ACT score by 4 points?

Check out our best-in-class online ACT prep program . We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your ACT score by 4 points or more.

Our program is entirely online, and it customizes what you study to your strengths and weaknesses . If you liked this Writing lesson, you'll love our program. Along with more detailed lessons, you'll get thousands of practice problems organized by individual skills so you learn most effectively. We're special in having expert instructors grade your essays and give you custom feedback on how to improve . We'll also give you a step-by-step program to follow so you'll never be confused about what to study next.

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Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master's degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel in high school.

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Analytic Rubrics

Important Notice: The content and links on this page may no longer reflect the most current information or resources. If you require assistance or further information, please reach out to us at [email protected] . We are here to help!

“ Infographic Rubric ” by  Cambrian College  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .

An analytic rubric separates the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the instructor to categorize and define exactly what each level of achievement looks like.

There are three main components of an analytic rubric:

• Dimensions/categories with descriptions, if needed
• Scale (usually 3-5 levels in a rubric scale)
• Task descriptions based on scale
• allows learners to plan their assessment according to the descriptors in the rubric
• gives learners a clear picture of why they achieved the grade they received
• allows instructor to grade more fairly; free of judgments 
• each set of criteria is evaluated separately providing students with formative feedback on each criteria, like where their strengths and weaknesses are

Disadvantages

• creation of quality analytic rubrics takes a lot of time upfront
• use of vague descriptions or inconsistent descriptions renders a rubric useless for grading and feedback
• can place more emphasis on the technical aspects of an assignment and thus miss deeper levels of cognition and creativity

Examples of Analytic Rubrics

Low & no tech (paper-based).

Paper-based analytic rubrics created using word processor:

• Essay rubric
• Portfolio Rubric (OER Commons)
• Oral Presentation rubric

Using Tech (Within and Outside of Moodle)

• Watch this video to learn how to create an assignment and an analytic rubric for that assignment all within the Moodle environment. 
• Online Rubric Generator
• Interactive PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Pro Version)