Gordaen's Blog

A rubric is designed to give some sort of quantifiable assessment, overshadowed with a sense of fairness. Though rubrics can lead to a very mechanical, disconnected approach to reviewing assignments, they do have a place in the education system. Unfortunately, many educators do not really think about how a given rubric works.

A common approach is to have three categories that essentially equate to excellent, good, and poor. Each is worth a given set of points. On one particular rubric that my presentation was based on recently, they were worth six points, three points, and one point respectively. That means someone scoring a “good” earns three out of six points, 50%! In every class I have ever been in, 50% was failing and far from good. Even a score of four is 67%, which is lower than required for credit in most college courses. Of course, many educators don’t want to hand out “perfect” scores too often, so excellent work is frequently given just under the maximum number of points. In this case, that would be five points out of six, or a whopping 83%, a low B for near perfection.

Telling a student that he or she did well and then handing him/her a failing grade doesn’t send the right message.