Grading with Rubrics

Many teachers use rubrics to make their grading and feedback to students more fair, transparent, and efficient. Making a rubric for each assignment helps us think through our expectations for assignments at a concrete level. Without them, we risk offering subjective feedback that doesn't address key elements of writing. Even experienced teachers can stray from their main goals due to stress and grading fatigue.

Imagine this scenario: A teacher receives a paper with more grammatical issues than they expected. The teacher becomes preoccupied with commenting on language issues alone, and forgets to provide substantial feedback on claims and evidence. Later, the student offers a revise paper but still receives a low grade. While the grammar improved, the teacher now focuses on different criteria that wasn't offered on the first draft.

Rubrics minimize the chances of this kind of inconstancy.

Making a rubric offers a range of advantages. Articulating your criteria for evaluation helps you further determine the goals or outcomes of your projects that students complete. Sharing rubrics with students as part of the assignment guidelines also gives them a clearer idea of what you want them to do.

Rubrics fall into two main categories, holistic and analytic. A holistic writing rubric provides benchmark criteria for a scale of grades or scores. For example, you could create a holistic rubric with an overall score of 1-9. Each score would include a list of criteria for a paper (or portfolio) to meet. See the example below.

You can find a more contemporary holistic rubric on the AP Language and Composition website. This one follows a scale of 1-9. Visit this link to view.


Analytic rubrics allow teachers to prioritize and weight criteria for papers. They contain a number of items (usually 4-6) with a point value assigned to each. Instead of a single score for the entire paper, analytic rubrics offer a maximum number of points, distributed among the rubric categories as the instructor sees most appropriate. Common rubric categories include:

Thesis/Main Argument
Claims and Evidence
Organization and Cohesion
Citations and Formatting
Clarity (Grammar & Punctuation)

Using an analytic rubric, a teacher awards points for each item, then tabulates the total score. A student's final grade for a paper then becomes the ratio of points earned to points possible. For example:

You can follow a few simple steps to create your own rubric for each major writing assignment. First, read through your course objectives and your program's outcome statement. Think about what outcomes this assignment addresses. From there, identify at least four main traits you want to see in each project--ideally one for each program or course objective. Next, you'll need to scale these items. Think in concrete terms about what qualifies as a successful project.

Imagine you've asked your students to make a podcast based on their research paper. This may seem like a hard project to evaluate using a rubric. However, a successful podcast has a number of key elements. Most of them begin with a clear introduction of the speaker and the topic. The speaker identifies their purpose and establishes the context for their podcast--in essence why certain people should listen. It marks off a clear audience, especially regarding how the issue effects certain groups of people. Next, a podcast might include interviews with experts, or with ordinary people in order to illustrate commonly held views. They identify each speaker clearly and explain their background and its relevance. Finally, an effective podcast has production value--clear audio, smooth transitions, and strategic use of music and control of background noise. Each of these criteria would make their way into your rubric.

Both holistic and analytic rubrics can help teachers and students succeed in their coursework. You should think carefully about how either one addresses your own teaching style and grading preferences. Some experts have argued that analytic rubrics tend to emphasize product over process. Meanwhile, critics of holistic rubrics have argued that they don't give teachers enough control over the individual parts of essays, and that analytic rubrics permit them to emphasize higher order concerns over lower order ones like grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It is your choice what form of rubric you use. It's best to stay consistent within a single semester. Alternating between holistic and analytic rubrics could confuse students.