essay grading rubrics

RDBE: Reasoning Distillation-Based Evaluation Enhances Automatic Essay Scoring

Recently, various encoder-only and encoder-decoder pre-trained models like BERT and T5 have been applied to automatic essay scoring (AES) as small language models. However, existing studies have primarily treated this task akin to a classification problem, focusing solely on outputting scores in the target text without offering interpretations for the generated scores. Departing from the approaches, we introduce Reasoning Distillation-Based Evaluation (RDBE), which integrates interpretability to elucidate the rationale behind model scores while enhancing performance through initial reasoning. This interpretive capability is acquired during training by leveraging generated reasoning from a large language model (LLM) to distill a small language model (SLM). Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of RDBE across all scoring rubrics considered in the dataset. RDBE outperforms both zero-shot LLM generation and generation from a baseline fine-tuned model, establishing itself as state-of-the-art in the corresponding dataset. This highlights its practical interpretative output and enhanced performance. 1 1 1 Implemented code released at https://github.com/AliGhiasvand86/RDBE

1 Introduction

Automated essay scoring (AES) stands at the forefront of modern educational assessment, offering expedient evaluations of extensive essay collections. This technology plays a pivotal role in providing instantaneous feedback to students and educators alike, revolutionizing the educational landscape by facilitating timely insights into writing proficiency.

Recently, there has been a noticeable surge in holistic AES methodologies incorporating fine-grained criteria and leveraging pre-trained language models. However, adapting these models, especially advanced ones like GPT-3.5-turbo, to accommodate diverse scoring rubrics poses a significant challenge. Presently, AES predominantly relies on smaller encoder-only or encoder-decoder models for their adeptness in learning structural nuances and their cost-effectiveness in terms of training and inference, contrasting with the higher computational demands associated with large language models (LLMs). According to our final model, which is a very low-weight LLM model, it can be used for edge devices and run on not-so-powerful local machines like mobiles or personal PCs. Based on this capability, this work can be considered to have a significant social impact.

To reference these approaches, [Wang et al., 2022 , Yang et al., 2020 ] have demonstrated promising results by employing BERT [Devlin et al., 2019 ] , while [Kumar et al., 2022 ] introduced a multi-trait scoring approach. Additionally, ArTS proposed by [Do et al., 2024 ] , which serves as the primary baseline for this study, utilized an autoregressive architecture with the T5 [Raffel et al., 2020 ] model for scoring essays. These studies highlight diverse strategies in automated essay scoring, each leveraging specific models and methodologies to achieve notable advancements in the field.

However, to the best of our knowledge, since most previous works constructed their target text as a simple score without providing any kind of interpretation, applying reasoning distillation-based evaluation to compel the model for reasoning and providing interpretation through the AES process was not discovered, and we have entered into this intuition with two objectives. The first is to understand the logic behind the model’s decision to give that score, and the second one is to improve scoring performance based on proper reasoning and interpretation. Towards this end, we propose a reasoning distillation-based evaluation framework for AES, making several key contributions: 1. We introduce RDBE, a simple yet effective AES framework that integrates learning how to reason and interpret essay evaluation during training and automates the same process during inference. Additionally, RDBE’s principles can be adapted for other tasks involving the evaluation of long-form generated text by customizing tasks and scoring rubrics. 2. By leveraging the DREsS New dataset [Yoo et al., 2024 ] as a foundation and creating reasoning and interpretation for the score of each data point across various scoring rubrics using the Llama-3-70B model, we propose a novel and effective dataset for fine-tuning models in reasoning distillation-based essay evaluation. 3. Experimental results demonstrate that our reasoning and interpretation not only enhance interpretative output significantly but also achieve state-of-the-art performance on the DREsS New dataset across all scoring rubrics, surpassing competitive baselines.

2 Related Works

2.1 automatic essay scoring.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a crucial field connecting natural language processing (NLP) and education. Early AES approaches were primarily based on regression or classification machine learning models, using textual features from essays [Salim et al., 2019 ] . Recent advancements have seen the integration of deep learning techniques like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [Dong and Zhang, 2016 ] and pre-trained language models, enhancing scoring accuracy. Recent advancements in automated essay scoring (AES) often leverage BERT and T5, significantly enhancing AES capabilities.

2.2 Reasoning Distillation

Recent studies have concentrated on extracting the logical reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller-scale models [Ho et al., 2023 , Hsieh et al., 2023 ] . These approaches involve extracting and utilizing rationales behind LLM predictions to enhance the training of smaller models, thereby boosting their overall performance.

3 Methodology

Our method involves utilizing two steps to form the whole framework. In the first step, we consider the DREsS New dataset and also consider the same conceptual descriptions used in each of the three scoring rubrics for content, organization, and language mentioned in the DREsS paper. The main definition of this problem is to score a received essay, given its subject and the specified scoring rubric, based on the score from the list [1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5]. An illustration of our two-step interpretable framework is depicted in Figure  1 .

3.1 Synthetic Data Generation

For each data point, as three scoring rubrics are considered, we prompt the Llama-3-70B model using the Groq API 2 2 2 https://groq.com/ to generate a score for each rubric. We then instruct the model to reason and interpret why the essay received that specific score for each scoring rubric. The generated reasoning from the LLM for each scoring rubric for each data point is then considered as a new output for further steps. As shown in the first step of the Figure  1 , we use the system message below. For the user message, we prompt the LLM with the corresponding subject, essay, scoring rubric, and score exactly in the order written in this sentence, each coming after its respective tag ([Subject], [Essay], [Scoring Rubric], or [Score]), so the model can generate reasoning for the achieved score. The system message is:

"You are a helpful, accurate, and fair virtual assistant with expertise in English composition, specializing in evaluating and accurately scoring essays written by students. A predefined [Subject] is provided, followed by the corresponding [Essay]. A [Scoring Rubric] is then explained, and the [Score] that the essay receives is based on the mentioned rubric without considering any other rubrics, even those logical or required, represented by a number from the list [1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0]. As an expert in accurate essay evaluation, your role is to provide insights into strengths and weaknesses related to the score by analyzing only both the quality of presence (if present) or absence of the aspects directly mentioned in the rubric’s explanation within the essay based on the received score and interpret them in a short text. For scores higher than 2.5, you should focus more on identifying strengths and give less attention to stating weaknesses. Conversely, for scores lower than 2.5, prioritize identifying weaknesses and give less attention to stating strengths."

3.2 Fine-tuning Backbone Model

In this step, we fine-tune our backbone encoder-decoder base transformer model using the data obtained from the previous step. The input is structured as follows: first, the scoring rubric is explained after a [Scoring Rubric] tag, then the essay subject is written after a [Subject] tag, and finally, the body of the essay is written after a [Essay] tag. The output consists of the corresponding reasoning and interpretation generated by the LLM, followed by “ —> ” and the score for that rubric. This setup (second step of the Figure  1 ) is designed to train the model to generate the score after providing its reasoning and interpretation.

4 Experiments and Results

In this section, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the utilized dataset, evaluation metrics, main achieved results, and evaluated baselines.

4.1 Datasets and Settings

For the main experiment, we utilized the DREsS New dataset, which consists of 1980 data points after removing invalid and NaN data (due to ongoing development issues with the dataset). Each data point includes the subject of the essay, the body of the essay, and scores for content, organization, language, and the sum of these three scores. The dataset was split into 60% for training, 20% for development, and 20% for testing using a random seed of 22.

During inference with the Llama-3-70B model, a temperature of 0 was set to ensure reproducibility. For both our approach and the baseline [Do et al., 2024 ] , we employed the LongT5-Base model [Guo et al., 2021 ] from the HuggingFace transformers library 3 3 3 https://github.com/huggingface/transformers as the backbone model for fine-tuning. This model utilizes transient-global attention and has approximately 220 million parameters, allowing it to handle longer input sizes compared to standard T5 models, as LongT5 models are pre-trained on inputs with more tokens. For fine-tuning, we used the AdamW optimizer and the cross-entropy loss function. The model was trained for 15 epochs with a batch size of 8.

Model	Fine-tuning Data	Content	Organization	Language	Total
Llama-3-70B	N/A	0.167	0.108	0.090	0.119
ArTS ]	DREsS	0.516	0.508	0.535	0.559
RDBE	DREsS	0.606	0.629	0.638	0.730

4.2 Main Results

For evaluation, we used the quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) [Cohen, 1968 ] , which is the official metric for the dataset. As mentioned in Table   1 , we assessed our framework on the test split of the DREsS New dataset separately for each of the three scoring rubrics and also for the total overall score. Additionally, we evaluated two strong baselines: the Llama-3-70B model in a zero-shot manner based on the prompt template "C" mentioned in the DREsS paper, and ArTS, as a a autoregressive scoring baseline on this dataset. However, our framework consistently achieved better QWK scores across all evaluations, outperforming Llama-3-70B despite having only 0.03% of its parameters and also performing better than ArTS, a novel and effective autoregressive strategy. Consequently, our framework reaches a state-of-the-art performance on this dataset.

5 Conclusion and Future Work

This study introduces RBDE, a novel and straightforward framework for interpretable automatic essay scoring. It provides a new dataset based on reasoning generated from a large language model, followed by training a model to distill reasoning and improve interpretability in essay evaluation. Based on the results, our approach of enhancing evaluation capability for small language models through reasoning distillation can be applied to other evaluation tasks, suggesting promising directions for future research in this field.

However, the main limitation of our work was the quality of our synthesized data. Due to our limited budget, we were unable to utilize more accurate models like GPT-4 for data synthesis, which could have generated higher-quality data and improved the performance of small language models in interpretation and scoring.

Acknowledgments and Disclosure of Funding

I conducted all the research, coding, and development of ideas and contributions for this project. Ali Royat, a PhD student, supervised me, providing mentoring and facilitating discussions. I am thankful to him. Furthermore, there are no financial activities supporting the submitted work.

Also, LLMs were never used for our research process, including developing ideas and contributions. They were only used to refine the language and grammar of our paper and not to write the paper from scratch.

• Cohen [1968] J. Cohen. Weighted kappa: Nominal scale agreement provision for scaled disagreement or partial credit. Psychological bulletin , 70(4):213, 1968.
• Devlin et al. [2019] J. Devlin, M.-W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) , pages 4171–4186, 2019.
• Do et al. [2024] H. Do, Y. Kim, and G. G. Lee. Autoregressive score generation for multi-trait essay scoring. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.08332 , 2024.
• Dong and Zhang [2016] F. Dong and Y. Zhang. Automatic features for essay scoring–an empirical study. In Proceedings of the 2016 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing , pages 1072–1077, 2016.
• Guo et al. [2021] M. Guo, J. Ainslie, D. Uthus, S. Ontanon, J. Ni, Y.-H. Sung, and Y. Yang. Longt5: Efficient text-to-text transformer for long sequences. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.07916 , 2021.
• Ho et al. [2023] N. Ho, L. Schmid, and S.-Y. Yun. Large language models are reasoning teachers. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) , pages 14852–14882, 2023.
• Hsieh et al. [2023] C.-Y. Hsieh, C.-L. Li, C.-k. Yeh, H. Nakhost, Y. Fujii, A. Ratner, R. Krishna, C.-Y. Lee, and T. Pfister. Distilling step-by-step! outperforming larger language models with less training data and smaller model sizes. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 , pages 8003–8017, 2023.
• Kumar et al. [2022] R. Kumar, S. Mathias, S. Saha, and P. Bhattacharyya. Many hands make light work: Using essay traits to automatically score essays. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies , pages 1485–1495, 2022.
• Raffel et al. [2020] C. Raffel, N. Shazeer, A. Roberts, K. Lee, S. Narang, M. Matena, Y. Zhou, W. Li, and P. J. Liu. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to-text transformer. Journal of machine learning research , 21(140):1–67, 2020.
• Salim et al. [2019] Y. Salim, V. Stevanus, E. Barlian, A. C. Sari, and D. Suhartono. Automated english digital essay grader using machine learning. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE) , pages 1–6. IEEE, 2019.
• Wang et al. [2022] Y. Wang, C. Wang, R. Li, and H. Lin. On the use of bert for automated essay scoring: Joint learning of multi-scale essay representation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.03835 , 2022.
• Yang et al. [2020] R. Yang, J. Cao, Z. Wen, Y. Wu, and X. He. Enhancing automated essay scoring performance via fine-tuning pre-trained language models with combination of regression and ranking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020 , pages 1560–1569, 2020.
• Yoo et al. [2024] H. Yoo, J. Han, S.-Y. Ahn, and A. Oh. Dress: Dataset for rubric-based essay scoring on efl writing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.16733 , 2024.

• Turnitin Guides
• Administrator hub
• Release notes and known issues
• Welcome to Turnitin Guides

Welcome to Turnitin’s new website for guidance!

In 2024, we migrated our comprehensive library of guidance from https://help.turnitin.com to this site, guides.turnitin.com. During this process we have taken the opportunity to take a holistic look at our content and how we structure our guides.

This page is here to help you orientate yourself with these changes and update your resources

What's new?

We have restructured the content to help you navigate it more efficiently.

We are consolidating numerous pages to make our individual guides more valuable as well as removing duplicated content.

For example, our Similarity Report guidance on help.turnitin is repeated in numerous places to cater for each individual integration and license type. On guides.turnitin this content will exist in a single place to allow for users of all integrations and licenses to find it easily. We have made slight modifications to these guides to help you understand which guides are pertinent to you and your institution.

Our guidance search has greatly improved

As a result of our content restructure, the search functionality for guides.turnitin has improved. Use the search bar at the top of any page to locate the guidance you’re searching for.

Dedicated student and administrator guidance hubs

Visit the Student hub area to locate student guidance. For students who access Turnitin via an LMS or VLE, check out the subsection Submitting to Turnitin .

Visiting the Administrator hub area to locate administrator guidance and release notes. 

iThenticate and Crossref Similarity Check guidance is now located on a separate site

To improve the experience for our iThenticate and Crossref Similiarity Check customers we have move their help content onto a separate help site, guides.ithenticate.com . This will improve the search for all users.

We have also created an orientation page for this site to help users become acclimatised.

Some guidance is no longer grouped within the LMS umbrella

Some guidance which was previously provided under each LMS has been moved to sections that reflect those workflows’ outcomes. Use the table below as a cheatsheet to quickly locate guidance.

Student guidance
LMS guidance for administrators and instructors
Similarity Report and AI Writing guidance
Creating PeerMark assignments guidance
Creating and managing QuickMarks, rubrics and grading PeerMark assignments guidance
User profile guidance for administrators and instructors
Administrator account settings and migration help
Release notes and known issues

Articles in this section

• Turnitin release notes
• Integrations release notes

• Grades 6-12
• School Leaders

Easy classroom set up with our FREE email course!

15 Helpful Scoring Rubric Examples for All Grades and Subjects

In the end, they actually make grading easier.

When it comes to student assessment and evaluation, there are a lot of methods to consider. In some cases, testing is the best way to assess a student’s knowledge, and the answers are either right or wrong. But often, assessing a student’s performance is much less clear-cut. In these situations, a scoring rubric is often the way to go, especially if you’re using standards-based grading . Here’s what you need to know about this useful tool, along with lots of rubric examples to get you started.

What is a scoring rubric?

In the United States, a rubric is a guide that lays out the performance expectations for an assignment. It helps students understand what’s required of them, and guides teachers through the evaluation process. (Note that in other countries, the term “rubric” may instead refer to the set of instructions at the beginning of an exam. To avoid confusion, some people use the term “scoring rubric” instead.)

A rubric generally has three parts:

• Performance criteria: These are the various aspects on which the assignment will be evaluated. They should align with the desired learning outcomes for the assignment.
• Rating scale: This could be a number system (often 1 to 4) or words like “exceeds expectations, meets expectations, below expectations,” etc.
• Indicators: These describe the qualities needed to earn a specific rating for each of the performance criteria. The level of detail may vary depending on the assignment and the purpose of the rubric itself.

Rubrics take more time to develop up front, but they help ensure more consistent assessment, especially when the skills being assessed are more subjective. A well-developed rubric can actually save teachers a lot of time when it comes to grading. What’s more, sharing your scoring rubric with students in advance often helps improve performance . This way, students have a clear picture of what’s expected of them and what they need to do to achieve a specific grade or performance rating.

Learn more about why and how to use a rubric here.

Types of Rubric

There are three basic rubric categories, each with its own purpose.

Holistic Rubric

Source: Cambrian College

This type of rubric combines all the scoring criteria in a single scale. They’re quick to create and use, but they have drawbacks. If a student’s work spans different levels, it can be difficult to decide which score to assign. They also make it harder to provide feedback on specific aspects.

Traditional letter grades are a type of holistic rubric. So are the popular “hamburger rubric” and “ cupcake rubric ” examples. Learn more about holistic rubrics here.

Analytic Rubric

Source: University of Nebraska

Analytic rubrics are much more complex and generally take a great deal more time up front to design. They include specific details of the expected learning outcomes, and descriptions of what criteria are required to meet various performance ratings in each. Each rating is assigned a point value, and the total number of points earned determines the overall grade for the assignment.

Though they’re more time-intensive to create, analytic rubrics actually save time while grading. Teachers can simply circle or highlight any relevant phrases in each rating, and add a comment or two if needed. They also help ensure consistency in grading, and make it much easier for students to understand what’s expected of them.

Learn more about analytic rubrics here.

Developmental Rubric

Source: Deb’s Data Digest

A developmental rubric is a type of analytic rubric, but it’s used to assess progress along the way rather than determining a final score on an assignment. The details in these rubrics help students understand their achievements, as well as highlight the specific skills they still need to improve.

Developmental rubrics are essentially a subset of analytic rubrics. They leave off the point values, though, and focus instead on giving feedback using the criteria and indicators of performance.

Learn how to use developmental rubrics here.

Ready to create your own rubrics? Find general tips on designing rubrics here. Then, check out these examples across all grades and subjects to inspire you.

Elementary School Rubric Examples

These elementary school rubric examples come from real teachers who use them with their students. Adapt them to fit your needs and grade level.

Reading Fluency Rubric

You can use this one as an analytic rubric by counting up points to earn a final score, or just to provide developmental feedback. There’s a second rubric page available specifically to assess prosody (reading with expression).

Learn more: Teacher Thrive

Reading Comprehension Rubric

The nice thing about this rubric is that you can use it at any grade level, for any text. If you like this style, you can get a reading fluency rubric here too.

Learn more: Pawprints Resource Center

Written Response Rubric

Rubrics aren’t just for huge projects. They can also help kids work on very specific skills, like this one for improving written responses on assessments.

Learn more: Dianna Radcliffe: Teaching Upper Elementary and More

Interactive Notebook Rubric

If you use interactive notebooks as a learning tool , this rubric can help kids stay on track and meet your expectations.

Learn more: Classroom Nook

Project Rubric

Use this simple rubric as it is, or tweak it to include more specific indicators for the project you have in mind.

Learn more: Tales of a Title One Teacher

Behavior Rubric

Developmental rubrics are perfect for assessing behavior and helping students identify opportunities for improvement. Send these home regularly to keep parents in the loop.

Learn more: Teachers.net Gazette

Middle School Rubric Examples

In middle school, use rubrics to offer detailed feedback on projects, presentations, and more. Be sure to share them with students in advance, and encourage them to use them as they work so they’ll know if they’re meeting expectations.

Argumentative Writing Rubric

Argumentative writing is a part of language arts, social studies, science, and more. That makes this rubric especially useful.

Learn more: Dr. Caitlyn Tucker

Role-Play Rubric

Role-plays can be really useful when teaching social and critical thinking skills, but it’s hard to assess them. Try a rubric like this one to evaluate and provide useful feedback.

Learn more: A Question of Influence

Art Project Rubric

Art is one of those subjects where grading can feel very subjective. Bring some objectivity to the process with a rubric like this.

Source: Art Ed Guru

Diorama Project Rubric

You can use diorama projects in almost any subject, and they’re a great chance to encourage creativity. Simplify the grading process and help kids know how to make their projects shine with this scoring rubric.

Learn more: Historyourstory.com

Oral Presentation Rubric

Rubrics are terrific for grading presentations, since you can include a variety of skills and other criteria. Consider letting students use a rubric like this to offer peer feedback too.

Learn more: Bright Hub Education

High School Rubric Examples

In high school, it’s important to include your grading rubrics when you give assignments like presentations, research projects, or essays. Kids who go on to college will definitely encounter rubrics, so helping them become familiar with them now will help in the future.

Presentation Rubric

Analyze a student’s presentation both for content and communication skills with a rubric like this one. If needed, create a separate one for content knowledge with even more criteria and indicators.

Learn more: Michael A. Pena Jr.

Debate Rubric

Debate is a valuable learning tool that encourages critical thinking and oral communication skills. This rubric can help you assess those skills objectively.

Learn more: Education World

Project-Based Learning Rubric

Implementing project-based learning can be time-intensive, but the payoffs are worth it. Try this rubric to make student expectations clear and end-of-project assessment easier.

Learn more: Free Technology for Teachers

100-Point Essay Rubric

Need an easy way to convert a scoring rubric to a letter grade? This example for essay writing earns students a final score out of 100 points.

Learn more: Learn for Your Life

Drama Performance Rubric

If you’re unsure how to grade a student’s participation and performance in drama class, consider this example. It offers lots of objective criteria and indicators to evaluate.

Learn more: Chase March

How do you use rubrics in your classroom? Come share your thoughts and exchange ideas in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, 25 of the best alternative assessment ideas ..

You Might Also Like

26 Fun Facts About the Moon That Reveal Solar System Secrets

No, it's not made of cheese! Continue Reading

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. 5335 Gate Parkway, Jacksonville, FL 32256

STUDENT:                                                               ESSAY:                                                                    

  There is one clear, well-focused thesis. Excellent command of subject matter. Evidence of independent thought. Supporting arguments relate to main claim & are well organized. Thesis stands out and is supported by details. Relevant, telling, quality details give important information, going beyond the obvious or predictable. Thesis is clear but supporting information is general. A reasonable command of subject matter. A capacity for independent thought, though not fully realized. Sufficent substantiation of claim. Supporting details are relevant, but one or more key issues is unsupported. Vague or unclear thesis. Inadequate command of subject matter. Unexamined, cliched thinking. Inadequate substantiation of claims. Supporting details are a seemingly random collection of information, unclear, or not related to the topic.

Clear Organization. Introduction is inviting, states the thesis, and previews the structure of the paper. Details are in logical order. Conclusion is strong and states the point of the paper. Significant lapses in organization. Introduction states thesis but does not adequately preview the structure, nor is it particularly inviting.  Some details not in logical or expected order and this is distracting. Conclusion is recognizable, but does not tie up all loose ends. Poor, hard-to-follow organization. There is no clear introduction of the main topic or structure of the paper.  There is no clear conclusion, the paper just ends. Little or no employment of supporting evidence - reader left to fill in gaps; thesis meagerly (if at all) established and introduction vague or too brief + weak or non-existent conclusion = seeming total disregard for progression of ideas

Extremely fluent and articulate relation of ideas; effective, powerful tone and language use; quotes, paraphrases and summaries expertly woven into own writing; structural design versatile and complex. Reasonably fluent relation of ideas attempt at tone and language use somewhat effective; quotes, paraphrases and summaries left wholly or partially disconnected, and/or repetitiously or formulaically set up; structure lacks variety and/or complexity. Transitions clearly show how ideas are connected, but there is little variety. Pacing is well-controlled, but there is a lack of elaboration in some areas.  Problematic written voice (possibly halting, blunt, confusing, nonacademic) - ideas unclear; inappropriate and/or mundane tone & language use; quotes, paraphrases and summaries few and not employed properly ("stranded"); no attempt at sentence variability; generally repetitious tone and language. Some transitions work well; connections between other ideas are fuzzy. Pacing is well-controlled, but sometimes the same point is repeated.

 Few errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, sentence stucture and grammar. Occasional errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure and grammar, but meaning is not obscured. 

• TemplateLab

Rubric Templates

46 editable rubric templates (word format).

A grading rubric template is a type of tool used for assessment. You can use it to express your expectations regarding the work of your students . In it, you’ll define what you will assess. You’ll also describe the criteria for how you will evaluate their work.

You can use this template to articulate what excellent work looks like. This would also help your students understand what they should work on.

Table of Contents

• 1 Rubric Templates
• 2 Where can you use rubric templates?
• 3 Grading Rubric Templates
• 4 Basic components of a rubric template
• 5 Blank Rubric Templates
• 6 Advantages of using rubric templates
• 7 Project Rubric Templates
• 8 Tips for creating a rubric template
• 9 Using your rubrics template

It takes a lot of time and effort to create a superior rubric template. You can make one on your own or download a blank rubric template from here. The important thing is that you first decide what criteria you’ll include in it.

Using rubrics will make it easier for you to assess the work of your students. With it, you can easily determine where your students excelled and where they need help. Although these templates are very convenient and effective, making them is another story.

If you make a template from scratch, you’d need a lot of time and effort. But once you’ve made or downloaded a template, your work becomes easier.

Where can you use rubric templates?

Teaching is one of the noblest professions in the whole world. But this job isn’t for everyone. It involves a lot of patience, determination, time-management skills , and so much more. Although it’s a highly fulfilling profession, there are times when it can be difficult.

As time goes by, curriculum change and methods for teaching are constantly revised. One effective method which teachers follow these days is the rubric method. This is a way to teach and assess the work of students easily and efficiently.

Grading rubric templates are quite popular with teachers. They can help teachers conduct an assessment of their student’s work and performance. But you can also use such templates in different ways, not just for teaching. You can use such templates for:

• Assessments
• Basic analytics
• Blank scoring
• Decision-making
• General math
• Group activity projects
• High school project presentations
• Infographics
• Job interview scoring
• Math projects

Other alternate uses of templates are as follows:

• Poster Grading
• Project-based learning
• Research papers
• Research project presentations
• Resume grading
• Science project
• Scoring guide
• Standard evaluations
• Student teaching portfolios
• Writing assignment grading

These are just some examples of how and where you can use such templates. A blank rubric template is a very useful tool which can make your life easier. If you’re a teacher and you haven’t even tried using such template, you should consider it.

Although it’s time-consuming to make, using it will save time in the long-run. Besides, if you don’t want to make the template yourself, you can download one from here.

Grading Rubric Templates

Basic components of a rubric template

In its simplest definition, a rubric is a tool for scoring. You use it to describe your performance expectations for a piece of work, a task or an assignment. The basic components of a rubric include:

• The criteria which you’ll use for the assessment. You need to describe all the aspects of performance you will grade your students on. You can also present the criteria as the objectives of the task that you’ll evaluate.
• Descriptors or words which will establish the effectiveness of your expectations. You need to identify the characteristics associated with your criteria. Do this by using the descriptors.
• Also, include the performance levels. Present this as a rating or a scale which has 3-4 or even more qualifiers. You can use this scale to identify the level of mastery of your students. You’ll give them a rating for each of your criterion.

You can use rubrics to give feedback to your students regarding their performance. It’s a tool you can use for grading projects, papers, presentations, and more. Along with these basic components, you can also add other information.

Just make sure not to complicate the template too much. Otherwise, it won’t be as easy to use as a basic rubric template.

Blank Rubric Templates

Advantages of using rubric templates

Aside from being very easy to use, rubrics also have other advantages. Their simplicity makes them very appealing. Using such templates would allow you to evaluate your students’ performance. You can do this with much efficiency and ease. Here are some advantages of using rubrics:

• Use them in analyses Such templates can provide you with diagnostic information. In turn, you can provide your students with formative feedback. You can link the rubrics to the instructions for work easily. When you use the rubrics for analyses, you’ll be able to come up with a formative assessment. But with it, you can also come up with a summative assessment. Do this if you need to grade using your students’ overall score.
• They’re holistic When you use rubrics, you can perform scoring and assessment quicker. You won’t need much time to use and understand the templates once you’ve filled them up.
• They can be general or task-specific Rubrics are very versatile. You can share them with your students. Do this to explain your instructions and your assessment methods. You can use the same blank rubric template for different assignments or tasks. All you need to do is modify the criteria and other information. You can also use the templates to ask your students to evaluate themselves. Also, you can even ask your students to help you construct your template. No matter how you plan to make or use the rubric, you’ll definitely benefit from it.

Aside from these advantages, there are more for you to enjoy. A well-designed template can offer a lot of benefits to teachers. They can help you to:

• Reduce the time you spend grading your students . You can do this by referring to the descriptors and the scale so you don’t need to write long comments.
• Help you identify your students’ strengths and weaknesses clearly. Once you’ve done that, you can adjust your lessons or teaching methods appropriately.
• Make sure that you’re consistent across time and graders.
• Reduce any uncertainty which can potentially come with grading.
• Discourage any complaints about your students’ grades.
• Let your students understand your standards and expectations.
• Give your students proper feedback.
• Keep track of and evaluate the progress of your students. You can do this as they work towards the goals you’ve set for them.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, a lot of teachers are now using rubrics. They use it to communicate their expectations to their students. As a teacher, you can use the template to give your students feedback. Give them information on how they’re progressing with their work. You can also use it to come up with your students’ final grades.

Project Rubric Templates

Tips for creating a rubric template

A grading rubric template includes the criteria you will use to assess a specific task. This can be anything from writing a paper to giving an oral presentation, and more. Rubrics permit teachers to convey their expectations to students.

You can also use them to track the progress of a student from the start of the task to the end of it. It provides a reliability of grades which is why students appreciate them too. Here are some tips to guide you when you’re creating a template for yourself:

• Establish the purpose and goal of the task you’ll evaluate Before you start creating your rubric, you should establish the purpose and goal of a task. Go through the learning outcomes associated with the task you’re planning to evaluate. The template you create can only work effectively if you set clear goals . In doing this, you can monitor your students’ progress as they work towards those goals.
• Determine the type of rubric you will use We’ve gone through some common uses of rubrics. This means that there are different types of templates you can create. Again, before you start, determine which type of rubric you will use for your assessment. The type to use may depend on some factors. These include your intended learning outcomes and the nature of the task. Also, consider the kind and the amount of feedback you will give your students.
• Establish your criteria In order to do this, you must go through your learning outcomes again. Also, review the assessment parameters so you can determine the criteria to use. Think about the skills and knowledge your students will need to complete the task. Come up with a list of criteria to evaluate outcomes across varying criteria. Make sure your criteria are distinct and clearly explained. Ideally, you shouldn’t write more than 7 different criteria.
• Establish the rating scale to measure the performance levels The next thing to do is establish your rating scale. No matter what kind of scale you use, make sure it’s clear and it can measure performance levels well. Decide whether your scale will only have numerical values or descriptors as well. Usually, rubrics have 3-5 different levels in their rating scales.
• Write the descriptions for each of your performance levels of your rating scale When you’re making your performance levels, include a descriptive paragraph for each. It should outline the expectations for the level. You can also include an example of the ideal performance within the level. Create parallel, measurable, and observable descriptions throughout your template.
• Test and revise your rubric if needed Before you use your rubric with your students, you should test it first. Arrange for testing conditions. Perform this with a number of graders who can use your template together. After they grade using your template, allow them to grade using a similar tool. Do this to ensure consistency and accuracy of the template you made. After the testing, search for any discrepancies between the 2 grading tools. If there aren’t any, then your template is quite accurate. Now you can share it (along with the testing results) with your colleagues. Ask them to assess your template and give their opinions. If they give you any helpful suggestions for modification, use them. You may also compare your template with templates your colleagues use. All these testing and modifying procedures are very important. Perform them to ensure the effectiveness of your own template.

Typically, your template should fit into a single page. This is ideal so you can quickly see all the criteria and descriptions. If you have a rubric with a lot of pages, you’d have to search through them to find the information you’re looking for.

This would reduce its efficiency. Therefore, you should plan the template well so you can construct it well too.

Using your rubrics template

A grading rubric template is an excellent tool for assessment. We’ve gone through the different advantages of such templates. You can definitely benefit a lot from using them. If it’s your first time to use rubrics, these pointers may help you out:

• When using a rubric, you don’t have to write long comments for each of your students.
• If your student needs feedback regarding his/her performance, refer to your template.
• Learn how to use the template properly. Do this so you don’t have to feel uncertainty when grading your students’ performances.
• Use different templates for different tasks or assignments. Although it may take time to create a template, you can keep on using it. When you need a new one, simply revise your blank rubric template then use it.
• You can also download a template here to save yourself time and effort.
• When you assign your students to a task or project, you can give them a copy of the rubric. This way, they will have an idea of how you’ll evaluate their performance.
• You can use the rubric to save time and effort. All you need to do is give your students grades according to your criteria and rating scale.
• Open your mind to the possibility of having to revise your template. If you discover that it doesn’t work, you need to make the necessary changes. Do this so you can get the most out of your rubric template.

More Templates

Behavior Contract Templates

Spelling Test Templates

All About Me Templates

Parent Contact Logs

Exit Ticket Templates

Plot Diagram Templates

• Chess (Gr. 1-4)
• TV (Gr. 1-4)
• Metal Detectors (Gr. 2-6)
• Tetris (Gr. 2-6)
• Seat Belts (Gr. 2-6)
• The Coliseum (Gr. 2-6)
• The Pony Express (Gr. 2-6)
• Wintertime (Gr. 2-6)
• Reading (Gr. 3-7)
• Black Friday (Gr. 3-7)
• Hummingbirds (Gr. 3-7)
• Worst Game Ever? (Gr. 4-8)
• Carnivorous Plants (Gr. 4-8)
• Google (Gr. 4-8)
• Honey Badgers (Gr. 4-8)
• Hyperinflation (Gr. 4-8)
• Koko (Gr. 4-8)
• Mongooses (Gr. 5-9)
• Trampolines (Gr. 5-9)
• Garbage (Gr. 5-9)
• Maginot Line (Gr. 5-9)
• Asian Carp (Gr. 5-9)
• Tale of Two Countries (Gr. 6-10)
• Kevlar (Gr. 7-10)
• Tigers (Gr. 7-11)
• Statue of Liberty (Gr. 8-10)
• Submarines (Gr. 8-12)
• Castles (Gr. 9-13)
• Gutenberg (Gr. 9-13)
• Author's Purpose Practice 1
• Author's Purpose Practice 2
• Author's Purpose Practice 3
• Fact and Opinion Practice 1
• Fact and Opinion Practice 2
• Fact and Opinion Practice 3
• Idioms Practice Test 1
• Idioms Practice Test 2
• Figurative Language Practice 1
• Figurative Language Practice 2
• Figurative Language Practice 3
• Figurative Language Practice 4
• Figurative Language Practice 5
• Figurative Language Practice 6
• Figurative Language Practice 7
• Figurative Language Practice 8
• Figurative Language Practice 9
• Figurative Language of Edgar Allan Poe
• Figurative Language of O. Henry
• Figurative Language of Shakespeare
• Genre Practice 1
• Genre Practice 2
• Genre Practice 3
• Genre Practice 4
• Genre Practice 5
• Genre Practice 6
• Genre Practice 7
• Genre Practice 8
• Genre Practice 9
• Genre Practice 10
• Irony Practice 1
• Irony Practice 2
• Irony Practice 3
• Making Inferences Practice 1
• Making Inferences Practice 2
• Making Inferences Practice 3
• Making Inferences Practice 4
• Making Inferences Practice 5
• Main Idea Practice 1
• Main Idea Practice 2
• Point of View Practice 1
• Point of View Practice 2
• Text Structure Practice 1
• Text Structure Practice 2
• Text Structure Practice 3
• Text Structure Practice 4
• Text Structure Practice 5
• Story Structure Practice 1
• Story Structure Practice 2
• Story Structure Practice 3
• Author's Purpose
• Characterizations
• Context Clues
• Fact and Opinion
• Figurative Language
• Grammar and Language Arts
• Poetic Devices
• Point of View
• Predictions
• Reading Comprehension
• Story Structure
• Summarizing
• Text Structure
• Character Traits
• Common Core Aligned Unit Plans
• Teacher Point of View
• Teaching Theme
• Patterns of Organization
• Project Ideas
• Reading Activities
• How to Write Narrative Essays
• How to Write Persuasive Essays
• Narrative Essay Assignments
• Narrative Essay Topics
• Persuasive Essay Topics
• Research Paper Topics
• Rubrics for Writing Assignments
• Learn About Sentence Structure
• Grammar Worksheets
• Noun Worksheets
• Parts of Speech Worksheets
• Punctuation Worksheets
• Sentence Structure Worksheets
• Verbs and Gerunds
• Examples of Allitertion
• Examples of Hyperbole
• Examples of Onomatopoeia
• Examples of Metaphor
• Examples of Personification
• Examples of Simile
• Figurative Language Activities
• Figurative Language Examples
• Figurative Language Poems
• Figurative Language Worksheets
• Learn About Figurative Language
• Learn About Poetic Devices
• Idiom Worksheets
• Online Figurative Language Tests
• Onomatopoeia Worksheets
• Personification Worksheets
• Poetic Devices Activities
• Poetic Devices Worksheets
• About This Site
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Understanding CCSS Standards
• What's New?

Ereading Worksheets

Free reading worksheets, activities, and lesson plans., site navigation.

• Learn About Author’s Purpose
• Author’s Purpose Quizzes
• Character Types Worksheets and Lessons
• List of Character Traits
• Differentiated Reading Instruction Worksheets and Activities
• Fact and Opinion Worksheets
• Irony Worksheets
• Animal Farm Worksheets
• Literary Conflicts Lesson and Review
• New Home Page Test
• Lord of the Flies Chapter 2 Worksheet
• Lord of the Flies Chapter 5 Worksheet
• Lord of the Flies Chapter 6 Worksheet
• Lord of the Flies Chapter 10 Worksheet
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Sister Carrie
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• The Odyssey
• The War of the Worlds
• The Wizard of Oz
• Mood Worksheets
• Context Clues Worksheets
• Inferences Worksheets
• Main Idea Worksheets
• Making Predictions Worksheets
• Nonfiction Passages and Functional Texts
• Setting Worksheets
• Summarizing Worksheets and Activities
• Short Stories with Questions
• Story Structure Activities
• Story Structure Worksheets
• Tone Worksheets
• Types of Conflict Worksheets
• Reading Games
• Figurative Language Poems with Questions
• Hyperbole and Understatement Worksheets
• Simile and Metaphor Worksheets
• Simile Worksheets
• Hyperbole Examples
• Metaphor Examples
• Personification Examples
• Simile Examples
• Understatement Examples
• Idiom Worksheets and Tests
• Poetic Devices Worksheets & Activities
• Alliteration Examples
• Allusion Examples
• Onomatopoeia Examples
• Onomatopoeia Worksheets and Activities
• Genre Worksheets
• Genre Activities
• Capitalization Worksheets, Lessons, and Tests
• Contractions Worksheets and Activities
• Double Negative Worksheets
• Homophones & Word Choice Worksheets
• ‘Was’ or ‘Were’
• Simple Subjects & Predicates Worksheets
• Subjects, Predicates, and Objects
• Clauses and Phrases
• Type of Sentences Worksheets
• Sentence Structure Activities
• Comma Worksheets and Activities
• Semicolon Worksheets
• End Mark Worksheets
• Noun Worksheets, Lessons, and Tests
• Verb Worksheets and Activities
• Pronoun Worksheets, Lessons, and Tests
• Adverbs & Adjectives Worksheets, Lessons, & Tests
• Preposition Worksheets and Activities
• Conjunctions Worksheets and Activities
• Interjections Worksheets
• Parts of Speech Activities
• Verb Tense Activities
• Past Tense Worksheets
• Present Tense Worksheets
• Future Tense Worksheets
• Point of View Activities
• Point of View Worksheets
• Teaching Point of View
• Cause and Effect Example Paragraphs
• Chronological Order
• Compare and Contrast
• Order of Importance
• Problem and Solution
• Text Structure Worksheets
• Text Structure Activities

Essay Writing Rubrics

• Narrative Essay Topics and Story Ideas
• Narrative Essay Worksheets & Writing Assignments
• Persuasive Essay and Speech Topics
• Persuasive Essay Worksheets & Activities
• Writing Narrative Essays and Short Stories
• Writing Persuasive Essays
• All Reading Worksheets
• Understanding Common Core State Standards
• Remote Learning Resources for Covid-19 School Closures
• What’s New?
• Ereading Worksheets | Legacy Versions
• Online Figurative Language Practice
• Online Genre Practice Tests
• Online Point of View Practice Tests
• 62 School Project Ideas
• 2nd Grade Reading Worksheets
• 3rd Grade Reading Worksheets
• 4th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 5th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 6th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 7th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 8th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 9th Grade Reading Worksheets
• 10th Grade Reading Worksheets
• Membership Billing
• Membership Cancel
• Membership Checkout
• Membership Confirmation
• Membership Invoice
• Membership Levels
• Your Profile

Want Updates?

43 comments.

I’m a teacher and I find very good materials here. I suggest it to everybody, particularly in education field.

Your materials are of great help. Thanks so much for helping other teachers with your knowledge and experience.

Seggie Mainawa

I am so happy about the information that you have been given. Thank you very much for the information.

Thank you so much sir! Its my first time as an online English teacher for primary level and I come across your site while groping for ideas on how and what to teach…Your site is really of great help and it is much appreciated. I learned a lot and this could help me improve on my teaching resources. Thank you so very much!!! More power and God bless!

This website is super helpful! Great resources for practicing.

Thank you for taking time to share all the resources. They are very helpful in many ways to students and to educators. I have visited it many times during my web search for various topics and I will continue visiting. Job well done to say the least!

I have used this site numerous times and find the worksheets and power points so perfectly crafted. You drive the points home, with clarity and ease of understanding.

jerusha gooden

Essay long about slavery and sugar plantion everything to do please help me need you about you need l want to ok

Thank you so much. It a great blessing to see them and have.them in my phone. Great blessings

I totally appreciate all your resources; saves me a lot of time. Thanks

Dear Sir, I am so happy to have found this site! It is quite comprehensive. I stumbled across it looking for help in tutoring English to elementary students and I find myself completing your worksheets just to stay sharp! Thank you for all your hard work. It is most appreciated.

Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment!

BRAVO! I found your site when I was looking for parts of speech resources and am absolutely blown away. THANK YOU for this gift in ELA resources that are spot on and ready to use. I think this is the first site I have found that I can actually use the resource confidently without having to recreate the wheel on my own. I’ve been exploring for over an hour and am seriously ‘geeked out’ by everything. Bless you!

Thank you for the kind words. I’m glad you like the site. Please come back again!

Dominic Potter

Thank you so much,well appreciated.

Pru Claassen

Good day I require rubrics for Grade 8 and 9 English First Additional Language please… Essays as well as transactional writing.

What a gift — helping teachers teach. Praying that your generosity of spirit in sharing what you have created is multiplied hundred fold.

Your website is very generous with information.

Thank you! Ms Simmons

I was in search of such site for our teacher Dr Imran khan wants us to write a research paper in Linguistics

I want a resource about cause and effect essay and about compare and contrast essay but this site is actually awesome and I had a lot to do with this amazing site

Simple and accurate, thank you. Very useful to teach students.

Just want to say thank you. This website is truly a gem!!! So many fantastic resources all in one place – and all for free. I cannot thank you enough for your dedication. You have helped me many nights this past year as I have scrambled through my first year of teaching. All of your materials are straightforward, ready-for-use, and engaging for students. What more could I ask for??

That’s exactly what I was going for. Thank you for the kind words and for visiting my site. Best wishes!

Thank you very much for sharing these with us. It is very very helpful!

Thank you so much for these resources.They are so helpful..Can you please include one sample essay if possible. Thanks, Lavanya.

very interesting resource!

Thank you so much for the wonderful work that you are producing.

You are most welcome. Thank you for visiting.

Edward Elmer

I am a teacher with the Sacramento County Office of Education in Sacramento California. I just want to say how thankful I am for discovering your site. You have my utmost admiration for your material. Are you developing more in the future?

Thanks again, Edward Elmer

Thank you kindly.

I am working on more materially. This site is my life’s work. I will continue to update it and improve it as my time allows.

Thank you for the kind words.

Your web page is AWESOME! Thank you for sharing all these wonderful activities!!

You are most welcome. Thank you for visiting!

it is really good

gino coronado

i learned a lot upon browsing some of the sample of rubrics hope you can put as many sample you can have

I’m happy to hear it. I have more that I will add soon.

mr. morton, love you…not because you shared these great ws, but to see how amazingly your thinking and teaching is crystal clear.lucky your students must be and making big in life with LA skills accquired from a superb mentor like you. its just not only fun to teach but also to solve your sheets. thats the best part of it! 😉

I am honored by your comments.

I hope to return your kindness by continuing to add more content in the years to come.

Best wishes.

Very useful information loved teaching my students theme using your resources!! Thank you!!

Thank u so much for the resources, checking essay are quiet easy than before, this is such a great help for us teachers.

Wow!! What an incredible resource. Thank you very much.

thanks… helpful for my composition class!

ladymacbeth

Thanks for everything Mr. Morton. I am a high school teacher of both enthusiastic readers/writers, and very nonenthusiastic readers/writers. How nice to find your resources. I’m sure I will be able to entice even the most reluctant to do some writing with the help of your prompts. Thanks for sharing!

I’m happy to hear it. I’d love to add more writing resources soon.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe Now

Popular content.

• Author's Purpose Worksheets
• Characterization Worksheets
• Common Core Lesson and Unit Plans
• Online Reading Practice Tests
• Plot Worksheets
• Reading Comprehension Worksheets
• Summary Worksheets
• Theme Worksheets

New and Updated Pages

• Capitalization Worksheets
• Contractions Worksheets
• Double Negatives Worksheets
• Homophones & Word Choice Worksheets

BECOME A MEMBER!

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

	Above Average (4)	Sufficient (3)	Developing (2)	Needs improvement (1)
(Thesis supported by relevant information and ideas	The central purpose of the student work is clear and supporting ideas always are always well-focused. Details are relevant, enrich the work.	The central purpose of the student work is clear and ideas are almost always focused in a way that supports the thesis. Relevant details illustrate the author’s ideas.	The central purpose of the student work is identified. Ideas are mostly focused in a way that supports the thesis.	The purpose of the student work is not well-defined. A number of central ideas do not support the thesis. Thoughts appear disconnected.
(Sequencing of elements/ ideas)	Information and ideas are presented in a logical sequence which flows naturally and is engaging to the audience.	Information and ideas are presented in a logical sequence which is followed by the reader with little or no difficulty.	Information and ideas are presented in an order that the audience can mostly follow.	Information and ideas are poorly sequenced. The audience has difficulty following the thread of thought.
(Correctness of grammar and spelling)	Minimal to no distracting errors in grammar and spelling.	The readability of the work is only slightly interrupted by spelling and/or grammatical errors.	Grammatical and/or spelling errors distract from the work.	The readability of the work is seriously hampered by spelling and/or grammatical errors.

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

The audience is able to easily identify the central message of the work and is engaged by the paper’s clear focus and relevant details. Information is presented logically and naturally. There are minimal to no distracting errors in grammar and spelling. : The audience is easily able to identify the focus of the student work which is supported by relevant ideas and supporting details. Information is presented in a logical manner that is easily followed. The readability of the work is only slightly interrupted by errors. : The audience can identify the central purpose of the student work without little difficulty and supporting ideas are present and clear. The information is presented in an orderly fashion that can be followed with little difficulty. Grammatical and spelling errors distract from the work. : The audience cannot clearly or easily identify the central ideas or purpose of the student work. Information is presented in a disorganized fashion causing the audience to have difficulty following the author’s ideas. The readability of the work is seriously hampered by errors.

Single-Point Rubric

Advanced (evidence of exceeding standards)	Criteria described a proficient level	Concerns (things that need work)
	Criteria #1: Description reflecting achievement of proficient level of performance
	Criteria #2: Description reflecting achievement of proficient level of performance
	Criteria #3: Description reflecting achievement of proficient level of performance
	Criteria #4: Description reflecting achievement of proficient level of performance
90-100 points	80-90 points	<80 points

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.

What Is an Essay Grading Rubric & 11 Tools to Streamline Your Grading

Mastering essay writing is a crucial skill, and grading these essays can be challenging for teachers. That's where essay grading rubrics come into play. These tools for teachers provide a clear framework for assessing student work, making the process more efficient and fair. This blog explores the ins and outs of essay grading rubrics, how they benefit both teachers and students, and how they improve the overall learning process. Dive into this essential aspect of learning assessment if you're looking to streamline your grading process and provide valuable feedback to your students.

What Is an Essay Grading Rubric?

In simple terms, an Essay Grading Rubric is an assessment tool used by educators to evaluate and grade students' essays. A rubric breaks down the essay into various components or criteria that the student needs to fulfill to achieve a certain score. These criteria usually cover aspects like organization, content, language use, and mechanics. The rubric typically includes four performance levels - excellent, good, fair, and poor - to categorize the quality of the student's work. Each performance level comes with a set of descriptors that clearly define what is expected at that level. 

Components of an Essay Grading Rubric

1. criteria.

The criteria in an essay grading rubric outline the specific areas that a student's essay will be assessed on. These criteria vary depending on the teacher's goals for the assignment. They may include elements like thesis statement, organization, supporting evidence, analysis, language use, and mechanics. Each criterion is usually given a numerical value that corresponds to a specific performance level.

2. Performance Levels

Performance levels, or grading scales , provide a framework for evaluating student work in a rubric. These levels are often labeled with phrases like "excellent," "good," "fair," and "poor." By associating these levels with numerical scores, educators can assign a grade to a student's essay based on where their performance falls on the scale.

3. Descriptors

Descriptors are the detailed explanations that accompany each performance level. They give students a clear understanding of what is expected at each level of performance. For example, a rubric might state that an "excellent" analysis has a clear and insightful interpretation of the text, while a "fair" analysis may lack depth or be unclear. Essay grading rubrics help teachers evaluate student work objectively and transparently. They break down the grading process into manageable components and provide students with clear expectations for their assignments.

Related Reading

• Best AI Tools For Teachers
• AI Rubric Generator
• Grading Papers
• Assessment Tools For Teachers
• How To Grade Papers
• Can ChatGPT Grade Essays

Types of Essay Grading Rubrics

An analytic rubric breaks down all the components of a project, presentation, or essay into different criteria. Each criterion is scored individually, which can be helpful for providing detailed feedback on specific areas of strength or weakness. While it may be more time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric, an analytic rubric allows for each criterion to be weighted to reflect its relative importance. It may require more work for instructors to write feedback for each criterion, but it can help provide students with specific areas for improvement.  On the other hand, a holistic rubric includes all the criteria 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. Holistic rubrics may save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student, but they provide less specific feedback than analytic rubrics.

General vs. Task-Specific Essay Grading Rubric

The use of general versus task-specific rubrics depends on the learning objectives and the assessment task. General rubrics are typically used for broad assessments where the criteria can be applied to a wide variety of tasks. In contrast, task-specific rubrics are tailored to the requirements of a particular performance task or an outcome. General rubrics can be used efficiently across a wide range of assignments, providing consistency in evaluation.  They can serve as a guide for what is expected of students without overwhelming them with overly specific criteria. On the other hand, task-specific rubrics are designed to assess a particular task or performance outcome, providing detailed guidelines and expectations for the students. Task-specific rubrics can provide targeted feedback that helps students understand their strengths and areas for improvement in relation to a specific task or learning objective.

6 Benefits of Using an Essay Grading Rubric

Rubrics are essential tools for grading essays. They bring a level of objectivity and fairness that is hard to achieve with other grading methods. Rubrics serve as a guide for what teachers are looking for in the student’s work. This eliminates potential bias from teachers, creating a standard that every student’s work is measured against.  The rubric can also help teachers move quicker through grading essays as they can simply refer to the guide when grading and awarding points. Rubrics can provide a level of transparency for students. This means they understand why they received the grade they did and what could have been done better. In the end, rubrics can save time and ensure more accurate grading for teachers while providing a clear roadmap for students to follow to help them achieve a better grade. 

1. Students know what is expected.

Rubrics outline what students are expected to learn from a particular assignment. They highlight the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should gain from their work. This means that students know what they need to do to get the grade they desire. They can check off each item as they demonstrate their understanding of the concepts across the rubric.

2. Students see that learning is about gaining specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes

Rubrics can be an essential tool in helping students to understand concepts. Instead of seeing the grade as an endpoint, rubrics can be an opportunity for students to see what they have learned and accomplished. This can be a motivating factor for students to do better in school.

3. Students may self-assess to reflect on their learning

Rubrics can be an essential tool for students , not just teachers. Students can use the rubric to assess themselves and get an idea of what they need to work on. This can help students work on the areas where they need improvement and can be a powerful tool for self-improvement.

4. Teachers and students are clear on what is being assessed

Rubrics are an essential tool for teachers as well. Teachers can use the rubric to let students know what is expected of them. Rubrics make it clear what the teacher is looking for in the student’s work, making it easier for teachers to assess work. 

5. Teachers may consistently assess student work without having to re-write similar comments

Rubrics make it easier for teachers to assess student work. Instead of having to write the same comments over and over, teachers can use the rubric to quickly assess students’ work. This can save teachers time and frustration and make it easier to provide feedback to students.

6. Teachers with high marking loads save considerable time

Rubrics can be a powerful tool for saving teachers time. Instead of having to spend hours grading individual assignments, teachers can use the rubric to quickly assess student work. This can save teachers hours of work and frustration and can make it easier for teachers to assess student work.

Essay Grading Efficiency with EssayGrader's AI Platform

EssayGrader is the most accurate AI grading platform trusted by 30,000+ educators worldwide. On average it takes a teacher 10 minutes to grade a single essay, with EssayGrader that time is cut down to 30 seconds That's a 95% reduction in the time it takes to grade an essay, with the same results.  With EssayGrader, Teachers can:

• Replicate their grading rubrics (so AI doesn't have to do the guesswork to set the grading criteria)
• Setup fully custom rubrics
• Grade essays by class
• Bulk upload of essays
• Use our AI detector to catch essays written by AI
• Summarize essays with our Essay summarizer 

Primary school, high school, and even college professors grade their students' essays with the help of our AI tool. Over half a million essays were graded by 30,000+ teachers on our platform. Save 95% of your time for grading school work with our tool to get high-quality, specific and accurate writing feedback for essays in seconds.  ‍ Get started for free today!

• Time Management For Teachers
• ChatGPT For Teachers Free
• Rubric For Writing Assignments
• Grading Practices
• Responding To Students Writing
• How Much Time Do Teachers Spend Grading
• Grading Essays
• How To Give Feedback On An Essay
• How To Grade Work
• Feedback Tools For Teachers
• Grading Tips For Teachers
• Grading Methods For Teachers
• Essay Grader Free Online
• Essay Grader For Teachers
• Tips for Grading Essays Faster
• Tips for Grading an Essay
• Tips for Grading Essays
• Tips for Quick Essays Grading
• Tips for Teaching and Grading Five Paragraph Essay
• Automated Essay Grading
• Essay Grading Software
• Essay Grading Website
• Free Automated Essay Grading Software
• Grading Essays Online
• Grading Essays with AI
• 12 Smart Ideas to Grade Essays Faster
• How to Grade College Essays Faster
• How to Grade Essays Faster

How to Design a Grading Rubric

1. Analyze the assignment

When creating a rubric from scratch, the first step is to thoroughly analyze the assignment you are grading. What are the main objectives of the assignment? What do you want your students to demonstrate through their work? Are there different smaller tasks within the assignment that need to be evaluated separately? By considering these questions, you can better determine the criteria and performance levels to include in your rubric.

2. Decide what kind of rubric you will use

There are various types of rubrics to choose from, including holistic, analytic/descriptive, and single-point rubrics. Deciding which type best suits your assessment will help you structure your grading criteria effectively. Holistic rubrics assess overall performance, analytic/descriptive rubrics break down performance into specific criteria, and single-point rubrics focus on proficiency levels.

3. Look for templates and examples 

Before creating your rubric from scratch, it can be helpful to look for templates or examples online. These resources can give you a starting point and help you align your rubric with the assignment's expectations and learning objectives. Collaborating with colleagues or asking students for input can also provide valuable insights.

4. Define the assignment criteria

Next, define the specific criteria you will use to evaluate the assignment. These criteria should align with the learning objectives and expectations of the assignment. Collaborating with colleagues, teaching assistants, and students can help you brainstorm effective grading criteria and ensure they are precise and unambiguous.

5. Design the rating scale

Consider the number of levels you want to include in your rating scale and whether you will use numbers or descriptive labels. The rating scale should provide a clear assessment of student performance and align with the assignment requirements. Ensure the rubric is organized logically and comprehensible to students.

6. Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

For each level of the rating scale, provide clear descriptions of what constitutes performance at that level. These descriptions should be observable and measurable, using parallel language across the scale. Consider what distinguishes each level of performance and how it aligns with the assignment's expectations.

7. Create your rubric

Once you have established the criteria and rating scale, create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet format. Online tools can assist in creating a rubric, but you will likely need to transfer the details to your grading platform manually. Ensure the rubric is clear and accessible to students.

8. Pilot-test your rubric

Before using your rubric to grade actual student work, pilot-test it with colleagues, teaching assistants, and students. Collect feedback on the rubric's effectiveness and make necessary revisions based on the results. Piloting the rubric can help ensure it aligns with the assignment objectives and provides valuable feedback to students.

11 Best AI Essay Grading Rubrics Platforms

1. EssayGrader

EssayGrader is an exceptional tool that streamlines the grading process for educators. Through AI technology, this platform significantly reduces the time taken to grade essays while maintaining high accuracy. It allows teachers to replicate their grading rubrics and provides the flexibility of setting custom rubrics. Educators can:

• Upload essays in bulk
• Detect AI-written essays
• Summarize essays efficiently

With over half a million essays graded by 30,000+ teachers, EssayGrader is a reliable tool for grading essays across different educational levels.

2. Gradescope

Gradescope stands out as one of the best AI graders, offering a sophisticated platform for automated essay evaluation. It allows for quick and accurate grading , customizable rubrics, and insightful analytics to identify common misconceptions among students. This tool enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of the grading process.

3. Turnitin

Renowned for its plagiarism detection capabilities, Turnitin extends its functionality to include AI essay grading. By leveraging AI technology, Turnitin ensures academic integrity, enhances originality, and offers in-depth feedback on writing quality. This tool supports the automated grading of various writing formats, making the assessment process more efficient.

4. PaperRater

PaperRater utilizes AI for consistent and unbiased grading across various subjects. It provides immediate feedback essential for large-scale online courses and improves scalability. With this tool, educators can ensure fair and efficient grading processes.

5. AI For Teachers

Known for offering free AI graders and tools for teachers, AI For Teachers provides an opportunity to leverage AI technology effortlessly. It comes with personalized rubrics, easy-to-use AI graders, and reliable customer support. This tool enhances the grading experience for educators.

6. Canvas SpeedGrader

Integrated within the Canvas Learning Management System, SpeedGrader utilizes AI for efficient and seamless essay grading. It offers a streamlined workflow, multimedia feedback options, and collaborative grading among educators. This tool enhances the grading experience within the Canvas platform.

7. CoGrader

CoGrader simplifies grading by integrating seamlessly with Google Classroom for easy import and export of assignments. It provides instant feedback on assignments, automates grading, reduces time spent, and ensures fairness by removing biases. This tool enhances the efficiency and accuracy of the grading process.

8. AI For Teachers

For ChatGPT Plus users, AI For Teachers offers free access to exceptional value without additional cost. By integrating ChatGPT capabilities, educators can create interactive learning experiences and tailor AI bots for specific classroom needs. This tool enhances student engagement and learning outcomes.

Smodin offers AI-powered writing assistance tools for rewriting, plagiarism detection, summarizing, and AI writing. With multilingual support and integration with various useful tools, Smodin caters to students, teachers, and content creators. This tool enhances writing and grading processes across different languages.

10. GradeCam

GradeCam facilitates quick scanning and grading of paper tests, providing timely feedback crucial for students' learning adjustments. It offers analytics tools that give insights into student progress and areas for improvement, supporting data-driven instructional decisions. This tool enhances the grading process and student feedback.

11. SnapGrader

SnapGrader enables teachers to quickly digitize paper tests and quizzes, eliminating manual data entry. It provides instant feedback to students, offers insights into grading accuracy and consistency, and supports various question formats. With SnapGrader, educators can efficiently assess student performance and provide timely feedback to enhance learning.

How to Choose the Best Essay Grading Rubric

Adaptability

When choosing a rubric for grading essays, it's vital to consider its adaptability. You want a rubric that can easily cater to different types of assignments and essays. Flexibility is key, especially if you assess an array of genres or topics. Being able to customize the rubric to suit the specific needs of your students and course objectives is imperative .

Accuracy and Specificity

The rubric you choose must accurately assess the essays. It should provide specific feedback on grammar, coherence, clarity, and writing style errors. Detailed error reports should be generated, highlighting the mistakes made by students. This specific feedback is crucial as it allows you to provide targeted feedback to help students improve their writing skills.

Ease of Use

You need a rubric that is not only accurate but also user-friendly. The rubric should be intuitive and easy to navigate. A clutter-free interface ensures that grading is efficient and that you can focus on providing valuable feedback to your students.

Bulk Uploading

If you are handling numerous essays, consider a rubric that allows for bulk uploading. This feature streamlines the grading process by enabling you to evaluate an entire class's worth of essays at once. This can be a huge time-saver and helps maintain consistency in grading.

Improvement Suggestions

Look for a rubric that does not just identify errors but also offers suggestions for improvement. Constructive feedback is crucial in helping students enhance their writing skills. A rubric that not only points out mistakes but also provides insights on how to rectify those mistakes can be incredibly beneficial.

Alignment with Traditional Rubrics

If you have been using traditional rubrics, ensure that the AI rubric aligns with your existing grading practices. You should have the flexibility to create custom rubrics based on your preferred criteria. This ensures that the rubric meets the specific needs of your course and students.

Integration

Select AI grading tools that seamlessly integrate with existing Learning Management Systems. This integration fosters efficiency in your overall workflow and helps streamline the grading process. A rubric that easily integrates with your existing systems can save you time and effort in managing assignments and grading student work.

• Grading Websites
• Essay Grader For Teachers Free
• Automated Essay Scoring
• AI Grading Tools For Teachers
• Grading Apps For Teachers
• How To Use Chat GPT To Grade Essays
• AI Grading Software
• Cograder Reviews

Save Time While Grading Schoolwork — Join 30,000+ Educators Worldwide & Use EssayGrader AI, The Original AI Essay Grader

EssayGrader is an innovative AI grading platform designed to transform the way educators grade essays. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we help teachers save time and provide accurate and effective feedback to students. With the power of AI, EssayGrader offers several key features that make the grading process more efficient and precise.

Replication of Grading Rubrics

Our platform allows educators to replicate their grading rubrics, ensuring that AI accurately assesses essays based on the established criteria. This feature eliminates guesswork and guarantees consistent and fair grading for all students.

Custom Rubrics

EssayGrader enables teachers to create fully customized rubrics tailored to their specific requirements. This flexibility allows educators to adapt the grading criteria to the unique needs of their classes and assignments.

Bulk Upload and Class-based Grading

Teachers can streamline the grading process by uploading multiple essays in bulk and grading them by class. This functionality simplifies the workflow for educators who need to assess numerous essays efficiently.

AI Detector

EssayGrader includes an AI detector that can identify essays generated by AI programs. This feature helps maintain academic integrity by flagging essays that may not reflect authentic student work.

Essay Summarizer

Our platform offers an essay summarizer tool that condenses essays into concise summaries. This feature enables educators to quickly grasp the main points of an essay and provide targeted feedback to students. Educators around the world trust EssayGrader to enhance their grading processes and provide valuable feedback to students. By leveraging AI technology, our platform empowers teachers to save time, improve grading accuracy, and deliver high-quality feedback to support student learning and growth. Join the thousands of educators who have already embraced this innovative tool and experience the benefits of efficient and effective essay grading with EssayGrader .

Start grading today

Save hours by grading essays in  30 seconds or less.

Related blogs

10 of the Most Useful Formative Assessment Tools for Classrooms (2024)

Harness the powerful classroom insights with these top 10 formative assessment tools, designed to enhance teaching and boost student engagement in 2024.

10 Benefits of Online Assessment in Education (2024)

Revolutionize grading! Explore online assessment in education and streamline feedback with EssayGrader. Try it today and improve student learning.

10 Teacher Feedback Examples for Students (2024)

Try these teacher feedback examples for students and boost student growth. Improve your grading, too, with EssayGrader’s software for teachers.

Essay Rubric: Grading Students Correctly

• Icon Calendar 10 July 2024
• Icon Page 2897 words
• Icon Clock 14 min read

Lectures and tutors provide specific requirements for students to meet when writing essays. Basically, an essay rubric helps tutors to analyze an overall quality of compositions written by students. In this case, a rubric refers to a scoring guide used to evaluate performance based on a set of criteria and standards. As such, useful marking schemes make an analysis process simple for lecturers as they focus on specific concepts related to a writing process. Moreover, an assessment table lists and organizes all of the criteria into one convenient paper. In other instances, students use assessment tables to enhance their writing skills by examining various requirements. Then, different types of essay rubrics vary from one educational level to another. Essentially, Master’s and Ph.D. grading schemes focus on examining complex thesis statements and other writing mechanics. However, high school evaluation tables examine basic writing concepts. In turn, guidelines on a common format for writing a good essay rubric and corresponding examples provided in this article can help students to evaluate their papers before submitting them to their teachers.

General Aspects

An essay rubric refers to a way for teachers to assess students’ composition writing skills and abilities. Basically, an evaluation scheme provides specific criteria to grade assignments. Moreover, the three basic elements of an essay rubric are criteria, performance levels, and descriptors. In this case, teachers use assessment guidelines to save time when evaluating and grading various papers. Hence, learners must use an essay rubric effectively to achieve desired goals and grades, while its general example is:

What Is an Essay Rubric and Its Purpose

According to its definition, an essay rubric is a structured evaluation tool that educators use to grade students’ compositions in a fair and consistent manner. The main purpose of an essay rubric in writing is to ensure consistent and fair grading by clearly defining what constitutes excellent, good, average, and poor performance (DeVries, 2023). This tool specifies a key criteria for grading various aspects of a written text, including a clarity of a thesis statement, an overall quality of a main argument, an organization of ideas, a particular use of evidence, and a correctness of grammar and mechanics. Moreover, an assessment grading helps students to understand their strengths to be proud of and weaknesses to be pointed out and guides them in improving their writing skills (Taylor et al., 2024). For teachers, such an assessment simplifies a grading process, making it more efficient and less subjective by providing a clear standard to follow. By using an essay rubric, both teachers and students can engage in a transparent, structured, and constructive evaluation process, enhancing an overall educational experience (Stevens & Levi, 2023). In turn, the length of an essay rubric depends on academic levels, types of papers, and specific requirements, while general guidelines are:

High School

• Length: 1-2 pages
• Word Count: 300-600 words
• Length: 1-3 pages
• Word Count: 300-900 words

University (Undergraduate)

• Length: 2-4 pages
• Word Count: 600-1,200 words

Master’s

• Length: 2-5 pages
• Word Count: 600-1,500 words
• Length: 3-6 pages
• Word Count: 900-1,800 words

Element	Description
Thesis Statement	A well-defined thesis statement is crucial as it sets a particular direction and purpose of an essay, making it clear what a writer intends to argue or explain.
Introduction	An introduction captures a reader’s interest and provides a framework for what a paper will cover, setting up a stage for arguments or ideas that follow after an opening paragraph.
Content	High-quality content demonstrates thorough understanding and research on a specific topic, providing valuable and relevant information that supports a thesis.
Organization	Effective organization ensures author’s ideas are presented in a clear, well-structure, and logical order, enhancing readability and an overall flow of a central argument.
Evidence and Support	Providing strong evidence and detailed analysis is essential for backing up main arguments, adding credibility and depth to a final document.
Conclusion	A strong conclusion ties all the main numbers together, reflects on potential implications of arguments, and reinforces a thesis, leaving a lasting impression on a reader.
Grammar and Mechanics	Proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation are vital for clarity and professionalism, making a whole text easy to read and understand.
Style and Tone	Correctness in writing style and author’s tone appropriate to a paper’s purpose and audience enhances an overall effectiveness of a particular text and engages a reader.
Citations and References	Accurate and complete citations and references are crucial for giving credit to sources, avoiding plagiarism, and allowing readers to follow up on the research.

Note: Some elements of an essay rubric can be added, deled, or combined with each other because different types of papers, their requirements, and instructors’ choices affect a final assessment. To format an essay rubric, people create a table with criteria listed in rows, performance levels in columns, and detailed descriptors in each cell explaining principal expectations for each level of performance (Steven & Levi, 2023). Besides, the five main criteria in a rubric are thesis statement, content, organization, evidence and support, and grammar and mechanics. In turn, a good essay rubric is clear, specific, aligned with learning objectives, and provides detailed, consistent descriptors for each performance level.

Steps How to Write an Essay Rubric

In writing, the key elements of an essay rubric are clear criteria, defined performance levels, and detailed descriptors for each evaluation.

• Identify a Specific Purpose and Goals: Determine main objectives of an essay’s assignment and consider what skills and knowledge you want students to demonstrate.
• List a Key Criteria: Identify essential components that need to be evaluated, such as thesis statement, introduction, content, organization, evidence and support, conclusion, grammar and mechanics, writing style and tone, and citations and references.
• Define Performance Levels: Decide on a particular scale you will use to measure performance (e.g., Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor) and ensure each level is distinct and clearly defined.
• Create Descriptors for Each Criterion: Write detailed descriptions for what constitutes each level of performance for every criterion and be specific about what is expected at each level to avoid misunderstanding.
• Assign Number Values: Determine a specific range for each criterion and performance level and allocate numbers in a way that reflects an actual importance of each criterion in an overall assessment.
• Review and Revise: Examine a complete rubric to ensure it is comprehensive and clear and adjust any descriptions or number values that seem unclear or disproportionate.
• Test a Working Essay Rubric: Apply a grading scheme to a few sample compositions to see if it effectively differentiates between different levels of performance and make adjustments as necessary.
• Involve Peers for Feedback: Share marking criteria with colleagues or peers for feedback and insights on clarity and fairness that you might have overlooked.
• Provide Examples: Include examples of complete papers or writing excerpts at each performance level and help students to understand what is expected for grading.
• Communicate With Students: Share a complete rubric with students before they begin an assignment and explain each criterion and performance level so they understand how their work will be evaluated and what they need to do to achieve highest marks.

Essay Rubric Example

Organization

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

Very Good/6 points: A paper contains a logical and appropriate organization. An author uses clear topic sentences.

Average/4 points: A composition contains a logical and appropriate organization. An author uses clear topic sentences.

Needs Improvement/2 points: A provided text has an inconsistent organization.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): A complete document shows an absence of a planned organization.

Grade: ___ .

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

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

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

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

Unacceptable/0 (zero): An author does not have apparent control over sentence structures and word choice.

Excellent/8 points: An essay’s content appears sophisticated and contains well-developed ideas.

Very Good/6 points: A paper’s content appears illustrative and balanced.

Average/4 points: A composition contains unbalanced content that requires more analysis.

Needs Improvement/2 points: A provided text contains a lot of research information without analysis or commentary.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): A complete document lacks relevant content and does not fit the thesis statement. Essay rubric rules are not followed.

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

Very Good/6 points: A paper comprises a clearly stated argument. However, a particular focus would have been sharper.

Average/4 points: A thesis statement phrasing sounds simple and lacks complexity. An author does not word the thesis correctly. 

Needs Improvement/2 points: A thesis statement requires a clear objective and does not fit the theme in a paper’s content.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): A thesis statement is not evident in an introduction paragraph.

Excellent/8 points: A submitted is clear and focused. An overall work holds a reader’s attention. Besides, relevant details and quotes enrich a thesis statement.

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

Average/4 points: An author begins a composition by defining an assigned topic. However, a particular development of ideas appears general.

Needs Improvement/2 points: An author fails to define an assigned topic well or focuses on several issues.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): A complete document lacks a clear sense of a purpose or thesis statement. Readers have to make suggestions based on sketchy or missing ideas to understand an intended meaning. Essay rubric requirements are missed.

Sentence Fluency

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

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

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

Needs Improvement/2 points: A provided text appears irregular and hard to read.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): Readers have to go through a complete document several times to give this paper a fair interpretive reading.

Conventions

Excellent/8 points: An author demonstrates proper use of standard writing conventions, like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, usage, and paragraphing. A person also uses correct protocols in a way that improves an overall readability of an essay.

Very Good/6 points: An author demonstrates proper writing conventions and uses them correctly. One can read a paper with ease, and errors are rare. Few touch-ups can make a submitted composition ready for publishing.

Average/4 points: An author shows reasonable control over a short range of standard writing rules. A person also handles all the conventions and enhances readability. Writing errors in a presented composition tend to distract and impair legibility.

Needs Improvement/2 points: An author makes an effort to use various conventions, including spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar usage, and paragraphing. A provided text contains multiple errors.

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

Presentation

Excellent/8 points: A particular form and presentation of a text enhance an overall readability of an essay and its flow of ideas.

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

Average/4 points: An author’s message is understandable in this format.

Needs Improvement/2 points: An author’s message is only comprehensible infrequently, and a provided text appears disorganized.

Unacceptable/0 (zero): Readers receive a distorted message due to difficulties connecting to a presentation of an entire text.

Final Grade: ___ .

Grading Scheme

• A+ = 60+ points
• F = less than 9

Differences in Education Levels

An overall quality of various types of texts changes at different education levels. In writing, an essay rubric works by providing a structured framework with specific criteria and performance levels to consistently evaluate and grade a finished paper. For instance, college students must write miscellaneous papers when compared to high school learners (Harrington et al., 2021). In this case, assessment criteria will change for these different education levels. For example, university and college compositions should have a debatable thesis statement with varying points of view (Mewburn et al., 2021). However, high school compositions should have simple phrases as thesis statements. Then, other requirements in a marking rubric will be more straightforward for high school students (DeVries, 2023). For Master’s and Ph.D. works, a writing criteria presented in a scoring evaluation should focus on examining a 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.

Recommendations

When observing any essay rubric, people should remember to ensure clarity and specificity in each criterion and performance level. This clarity helps both an evaluator and a student to understand principal expectations and how a written document will be assessed (Ozfidan & Mitchell, 2022). Consistency in language and terminology across an essay rubric is crucial to avoid confusion and maintain fairness. Further on, it is essential to align a working scheme with learning objectives and goals of an essay’s assignment, ensuring all key components, such as thesis, content, organization, and grammar, are covered comprehensively (Stevens & Levi, 2023). Evaluators should also be aware of the weighting and scoring distribution, making sure they accurately reflect an actual importance of each criterion. Moreover, testing a rubric on sample essays before finalizing it can help to identify any mistakes or imbalances in scores. Essentially, providing concrete examples or descriptions for each performance level can guide students in understanding what is expected for each grade (Taylor et al., 2024). In turn, an essay rubric should be reviewed, revised, and updated after each educational year to remain relevant and aligned with current academic standards. Lastly, sharing and explaining grading assessment with students before they start their composition fosters transparency and helps them to put more of their efforts into meeting defined criteria, ultimately improving their writing and learning experience in general.

Common Mistakes

• Lack of Specificity: Descriptions for each criterion and performance level are too vague, leading to ambiguity and confusion for both graders and students.
• Overcomplicating a Rubric: Including too many criteria or overly complex descriptions that make a scoring assessment difficult to use effectively.
• Unbalanced Weighting: Assigning disproportionate number values to different criteria, which can mislead an overall assessment and not accurately reflect an actual importance of each component.
• Inconsistent Language: Using inconsistent terminology or descriptors across performance levels, which can confuse users and make a rubric less reliable.
• Not Aligning With Objectives: Failing to align a particular criteria and performance levels with specific goals and learning outcomes of an assignment.
• Omitting Key Components: Leaving out important criteria that are essential for evaluating a paper comprehensively, such as citations or a conclusion part.
• Lack of Examples: Not providing examples or concrete descriptions of what constitutes each performance level, making it harder for students to understand expectations.
• Ignoring Grammar and Mechanics: Overlooking an actual importance of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, which are crucial for clear and professional writing.
• Not Updating an Essay Rubric: Using outdated rubrics that do not reflect current educational standards or specific assignment needs.
• Insufficient Testing: Failing to test a grading scheme on some sample documents to ensure it effectively differentiates between levels of performance and provides fair assessments.

Essay rubrics help teachers, instructors, professors, and tutors to analyze an overall quality of compositions written by students. Basically, an assessment scheme makes an analysis process simple for lecturers, and it lists and organizes all of the criteria into one convenient paper. In other instances, students use such evaluation tools to improve their writing skills. However, they vary from one educational level to the other. Master’s and Ph.D. assessment schemes focus on examining complex thesis statements and other writing mechanics. However, high school grading criteria examine basic writing concepts.  As such, the following are some of the tips that one must consider when preparing any rubric.

• Include all mechanics that relate to essay writing.
• Cover different requirements and their relevant grades.
• Follow clear and understandable statements.

DeVries, B. A. (2023). Literacy assessment and intervention for classroom teachers . Routledge.

Harrington, E. R., Lofgren, I. E., Gottschalk Druschke, C., Karraker, N. E., Reynolds, N., & McWilliams, S. R. (2021). Training graduate students in multiple genres of public and academic science writing: An assessment using an adaptable, interdisciplinary rubric. Frontiers in Environmental Science , 9 , 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2021.715409

Mewburn, I., Firth, K., & Lehmann, S. (2021). Level up your essays: How to get better grades at university . NewSouth.

Ozfidan, B., & Mitchell, C. (2022). Assessment of students’ argumentative writing: A rubric development. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies , 9 (2), 121–133. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/1064

Stevens, D. D., & Levi, A. (2023). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Taylor, B., Kisby, F., & Reedy, A. (2024). Rubrics in higher education: An exploration of undergraduate students’ understanding and perspectives. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2299330

To Learn More, Read Relevant Articles

How to Cite a Newspaper Article in APA 7 With Examples

• Icon Calendar 12 October 2020
• Icon Page 754 words

"Who Am I" Essay Examples

• Icon Calendar 10 October 2020
• Icon Page 5431 words

What are rubrics and how do they affect student learning?

Rubrics are scoring criteria for grading or marking student assessment. When shared before assessment, rubrics communicate to students how they will be evaluated and how they should demonstrate their knowledge and to understand their own score. As pedagogy continues to transform, It’s important to consider the history of rubrics as a context for this pedagogical moment.

By completing this form, you agree to Turnitin's Privacy Policy . Turnitin uses the information you provide to contact you with relevant information. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

Rubrics are guidelines for student assessments, often used as scoring criteria for grading and marking student work. They are best made clear to students before an assessment; effective rubrics give students transparency into how they will be evaluated, how they should demonstrate their knowledge, what to expect on tests and assignments, and provide next steps in learning.

Rubrics also clarify any marking or grading outcomes, helping students understand why they received their particular score or grade. A good rubric promotes student learning .

In sum, rubrics make clear what counts, what defines excellent work, and uphold grading consistency so that students can succeed and learn in alignment with course expectations; they define the performance instead of judging. Rubrics, just like assessments, are best when designed to connect to learning and outcomes.

Notable pedagogist, Thomas R. Guskey, states , “Interest in rubrics surged during the 1990s as educators turned their focus to documenting student achievement of specific learning standards . Today, rubrics for describing and assessing student performance can be found at every level of education, from preschool and kindergarten to graduate and professional school.”

The history of rubrics follows the proliferation of compulsory education and learning standards. An increasing emphasis on formative assessment has further encouraged the adoption of rubrics within secondary and higher education classrooms, both in North America and East Asia ( Ragupathi & Lee, 2020 ).

Rubrics set evaluation standards that can promote fair grading practices, even across a teaching team. In the case of standardized exams, they uphold consistent marking across an even wider swath of students and graders. They are “multidimensional sets of scoring guidelines that can be used to provide consistency in evaluating student work. They spell out scoring criteria so that multiple teachers, using the same rubric for a student's essay, for example, would arrive at the same score or grade” ( Edutopia, 2018 ).

Furthermore, when students understand rubrics ahead of assessment, they understand how they will be evaluated.

In sum, effective rubrics can:

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

What do effective rubrics look like? They’re more than just a checklist, but rather guidelines that focus on skills that demonstrate learning.

According to Susan M. Brookhart , there are two essential components of effective rubrics:

• Criteria that relates to the learning (and not “the tasks” )
• Performance level descriptions against a continuum of quality.

Researchers recommend two or more performance criteria with distinct, clear, and meaningful labels ( Brookhart, 2018 ) along with 3-5 quality or performance levels ( Popham, 2000 ; Suskie, 2009 ).

An example of five performance levels might look like this:

• Far Below Expectations
• Below Expectations
• Meets Expectations
• Exceeds Expectations
• Demonstrates Excellence

Criteria should center around learning, not tasks. “Appropriate criteria,” according to Brookhart’ s 2018 research , “are the key to effective rubrics. Trivial or surface-level criteria will not draw learning goals for students as clearly as substantive criteria. Students will try to produce what is expected of them.”

For example, examples of criteria might look like the following:

• The thesis sentence is present with strong analytical components and supported by the rest of the essay
• The thesis sentence is present with analytical components and supported by the rest of the essay
• Thesis sentence is present, albeit more summary than analysis, and supported by the rest of the essay
• Thesis sentence is present but not supported by the rest of the essay
• Not present

There are two main types of rubrics for evaluating student work: holistic and analytic rubrics . Each has its strengths with regard to how educators can approach evaluation of student learning. A third type of rubric is the checklist, which contains no performance descriptions, and is solely composed of criteria.

Holistic rubrics focus on the overall product or performance rather than the components. For instance, instead of dividing essay evaluation into an evaluation of thesis, supporting arguments, structure, and so forth and so on, holistic rubrics look at the entire efficacy of the essay itself. Hence, holistic rubrics would have criteria that describe competency levels of essay writing in a single scale, from “essay does not successfully argue its point with no supporting arguments and consistent writing errors” to “essay introduces original ideas with strong supporting arguments and technical writing excellence.”

A holistic rubric produces a single score based on a judgment of overall student work.

Holistic rubrics are used when missteps can be tolerated, and the focus is on general quality and what the learner can do rather than what they cannot do ( Chase, 1999 ). Oftentimes, holistic rubrics can be used when student skills are more advanced. They can also save time because there are fewer components and decisions to consider.

Because they focus on the generalized quality of student work, it may be more challenging to provide feedback on specific components. This may be challenging when, for example, a student’s work is at varying levels—for example, if an essay has original ideas, analysis, and supporting arguments but has many syntactical errors. Additionally, because holistic rubrics tend towards sweeping descriptions, scoring may be susceptible to subjectivity.

Analytic rubrics provide levels of performance for multiple criteria, with scores for separate and individual components of student work; they assess work in multiple dimensions. Analytic rubrics also provide descriptions for each of these performance levels so students know what is expected of them ( Mertler, 2001 ). Additionally, criterion can be weighted differently to reflect the importance of each component.

Because they are more comprehensive and examine different components of student work, they take more time to develop. And unless the description for each criteria is well defined, scoring may be inconsistent.

With checklist rubrics, there are only two performance levels (yes/no, present/absent, pass/fail, etc.). And a useful checklist usually has many criteria. They do enable faster grading, and a checklist provides ample clarity for students. Checklists enable an all-or-nothing approach, which is helpful at certain stages of learning. For instance, if a student is learning to write an essay, a checklist is an effective way for students to understand what they need to provide.

Oftentimes, a checklist can be converted into an analytic rubric.

Checklists are long, and may be time-consuming to create. When students are no longer new to a topic, checklists don’t provide the nuanced feedback necessary to move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. In other words, checklists aren’t as helpful when students are “most of the way” towards competence.

A rubric is most often structured like a matrix with two main components: criteria (usually listed on the left side) and the performance descriptions (listed across the top).

Rubric development involves several steps:

• Define the purpose of an assessment
• Establish evaluation criteria
• Determine performance levels
• Provide descriptions for each performance level

Is an assignment measuring the presence of criteria or the quality of criteria?

Consider the student stage of learning in this step. When students are just beginning to write an essay or engage in geometry theorems, they are in early stages of learning. Students learning a new concept or skill may benefit from a binary approach towards whether criteria is present or not.

Students in more advanced stages of learning may benefit from being measured by a spectrum of quality.

Analytic and holistic rubrics measure the quality of criteria. Checklists or checklist rubrics measure the presence of criteria.

When developing rubrics, select the most important criteria in evaluating student work. Part of establishing criteria is asking yourself questions about what you want to identify in student work. For instance, why are you giving students this assignment? What are the characteristics of good student work? What specific skills do you want demonstrated in the assessment?

By asking yourself questions about the purpose of the assessment and how it aligns to learning objectives, you can then decide the 3-8 criteria that shows what you want students to achieve.

Determine what the performance levels should be and how many. There are usually 3-5 performance levels (qualitative), and oftentimes they are associated with scores or points (quantitative). You may want to begin with the anchors (best and worst), first before exploring how many levels you want in between. Students can often be confused by the “fuzzy” middle, so it is important to make each level distinct.

According to notable researcher Susan Brookhart, it is important to be clear and thorough in performance descriptions, which also prompt student learning. Brookhart states, “If the criterion is simply having or counting something in their work (e.g., “has 5 paragraphs”), students need not pay attention to the quality of what their work has. If the criterion is substantive (e.g., “states a compelling thesis”), attention to quality becomes part of the work” ( Brookhart, 2018 ).

For holistic rubrics, it is critical to write thorough and clear narrative descriptions of each criterion, particularly because they have to be comprehensive in describing the whole product.

For analytic rubrics, each criterion needs a description of performance level.

Language should be neutral and as objective as possible, avoiding subjective words like “interesting.” Instead, outline objective indicators like “new idea that analyzes instead of summarizes.”

Finally, consider evaluating your own rubric.

Depaul University’s Teaching Commons suggests the following questions to ask when evaluating a rubric:

• Does the rubric relate to the outcome(s) being measured?
• Does it cover important criteria for student performance?
• Does the top end of the rubric reflect excellence?
• Are the criteria and scales well-defined?
• Can the rubric be applied consistently by different scorers?

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but it is helpful to distinguish their differences. Rubrics are used to communicate student performance and expectations on assessments. Scales, on the other hand, describe how a student has progressed in their learning journey relative to stated learning goals ( University of Maryland Baltimore ).

“Rubrics with criteria that are about the task—with descriptions of performance that amount to checklists for directions—assess compliance and not learning. Rubrics with counts instead of quality descriptions assess the existence of something and not its quality,” according to Brookhart ( 2013 ).

Confusing learning outcomes with tasks can result in using rubrics as a checklist, which are often binary (e.g., “yes/no”) in nature. But rubrics that are more descriptive and reflect higher-order thinking provide students with action items, uphold assessment with integrity, and improve learning outcomes.

Rubrics that do not align to learning goals can also limit learning. Ensure that rubrics focus on core learning goals and are in alignment with course expectations. For example, if formatting margins on an essay is not a course objective but is included in rubrics, the efficacy of that rubric may be compromised. Students may confuse what it is they should do with what it is they should learn; when this occurs, once the students complete a task, they may feel their learning has ended instead of seeing learning as a continuum.

Other misperceptions include confusing rubrics with evaluative rating scales. Rating scales are useful for grading, and involve evaluations across a scale without description (e.g., 1-5, always/sometimes/never or A-F). While rating scales are useful for grading, they don’t offer students a description of quality that they can utilize as they navigate learning.

While effective rubrics can foster learning, they can be limited in scope. If, according to Angelo State University’s Instruction Design , “educators use the rubric to tell students what to put in an assignment, then that may be all they put. It may also be all that they learn.”

Wolf and Stevens, state that rubrics have more advantages than disadvantages but “If poorly designed they can actually diminish the learning process. Rubrics can act as a straitjacket, preventing creations other than those envisioned by the rubric-maker from unfolding. (“If it is not on the rubric, it must not be important or possible.”) The challenge then is to create a rubric that makes clear what is valued in the performance or product—without constraining or diminishing them” ( Wolf & Stevens, 2007 ).

Effective rubrics also take a lot of time to develop.

The formative feedback process, a core element of student-teacher communication, begins with setting expectations. Rubrics are “one way to make learning expectations explicit for learners” (Brookhart, 2018 ). These clear and explicit expectations help students see what learning looks like so that they can then absorb feedback in alignment with those learning goals.

Jay McTighe specifies that effective rubrics do the following:

• Clearly define criteria for judging student performance based on targeted standards/outcomes
• Promote more consistent evaluation of student performance
• Help clarify instructional goals and serve as teaching targets
• Provide specific feedback to learners and teachers
• Help students focus on the important dimensions of a product or performance
• Enable criterion-based evaluation and standards-based grading
• Support student self- and peer-assessment ( McTighe, 2016 ).

Rubrics give students a greater chance of achieving a clear and defined target. They guide curriculum planning and uphold accurate assessments with integrity. Effective rubrics enable self-assessment and self-directed student learning.

Effective rubrics support the student learning journey. Additionally, rubrics have the potential to advance the learning of historically marginalized students. According to Wolf and Stevens, “An often unrecognized benefit of rubrics is that they can make learning expectations or assumptions about the tasks themselves more explicit ( Andrade & Ying, 2005 ). In academic environments [sic] we often operate on unstated cultural assumptions about the expectations for student performance and behavior and presume that all students share those same understandings” ( 2007, p. 13 ). In other words, rubrics make explicit what may be too nuanced for first generation students or English learners to access.

Rubrics are, in essence, not only part of assessment but also a teaching and learning junction with the potential to increase student learning outcomes and uphold integrity. When students feel supported, their love of learning increases into a lifelong journey.

Center for Excellence in Teaching

Home > Resources > Academic essay rubric

Academic essay rubric

This is a grading rubric an instructor uses to assess students’ work on this type of assignment. It is a sample rubric that needs to be edited to reflect the specifics of a particular assignment. 

Download this file

Download this file [63.33 KB]

Back to Resources Page

AI Essay Grader

CoGrader is the Free AI Essay Grader for Teachers that helps you save 80% of the time grading essays with instant first-pass feedback & grades, based on your rubrics. Grade Narrative, Informative or Argumentative essays using CoGrader. It's free to use for up to 100 essays/month.

Pick your Rubric to Grade Essays with AI

We have +30 Rubrics in our Library - but you can also build your own rubrics.

Argumentive Essays

Rubrics from 6th to 12th Grade and Higher Education. Grades Claim/Focus, Support/Evidence, Organization and Language/Style.

Informative Essays

Rubrics from 6th to 12th Grade and Higher Education. Grades Clarity/Focus, Development, Organization and Language/Style.

Narrative Essays

Rubrics from 6th to 12th Grade and Higher Education. Grades Plot/Ideas, Development/Elaboration, Organization and Language/Style.

Analytical Essays

Rubrics from 6th to 12th Grade and Higher Education. Grades Claim/Focus, Analysis/Evidence, Organization and Language/Style.

AP Essays, DBQs & LEQs

Grade Essays from AP Classes, including DBQs & LEQs. Grades according to the AP rubrics.

+30 Rubrics Available

You can also build your own rubric/criteria.

Your AI Essay Grading Tool

It's a never-ending task that consumes valuable time and energy, often leaving teachers frustrated and overwhelmed

With CoGrader, grading becomes a breeze. You will have more time for what really matters: teaching, supporting students and providing them with meaningful feedback.

Meet your AI Grader

Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get First-Pass Feedback on your students' assignments instantaneously, detect ChatGPT usage and see class data analytics.

Save time and Effort

Streamline your grading process and save hours or days.

Ensure fairness and consistency

Remove human biases from the equation with CoGrader's objective and fair grading system.

Provide better feedback

Provide lightning-fast comprehensive feedback to your students, helping them understand their performance better.

Class Analytics

Get an x-ray of your class's performance to spot challenges and strengths, and inform planning.

Google Classroom Integration

Import assignments from Google Classroom to CoGrader, and export reviewed feedback and grades back to it.

Canvas and Schoology compatibility

Export your assignments in bulk and upload them to CoGrader with one click.

Used at 1000+ schools

Backed by UC Berkeley

Teachers love CoGrader

How does CoGrader work?

It's easy to supercharge your grading process

Import Assignments from Google Classroom

CoGrader will automatically import the prompt given to the students and all files they have turned in.

Define Grading Criteria

Use our rubric template, based on your State's standards, or set up your own grading criteria to align with your evaluation standards, specific requirements and teaching objectives. Built in Rubrics include Argument, Narrative and Informative pieces.

Get Grades, Feedback and Reports

CoGrader generates detailed feedback and justification reports for each student, highlighting areas of improvement together with the grade.

Review and Adjust

The teacher has the final say! Adjust the grades and the feedback so you can make sure every student gets the attention they deserve.

Want to see what Education looks like in 2023?

Get started right away, not sure yet, frequently asked questions.

CoGrader: the AI copilot for teachers.

You can think of CoGrader as your teaching assistant, who streamlines grading by drafting initial feedback and grade suggestions, saving you time and hassle, and providing top notch feedback for the kids. You can use standardized rubrics and customize criteria, ensuring that your grading process is fair and consistent. Plus, you can detect if your student used ChatGPT to answer the assignment.

CoGrader considers the rubric and your grading instructions to automatically grade and suggest feedback, using AI. Currently CoGrader integrates with Google Classroom and will soon integrate with other LMS. If you don't use Google Classroom, let your LMS provider know that you are interested, so they speed up the process.

Try it out! We have designed CoGrader to be user-friendly and intuitive. We offer training and support to help you get started. Let us know if you need any help.

Privacy matters to us and we're committed to protecting student privacy. We are FERPA-compliant. We use student names to match assignments with the right students, but we quickly change them into a code that keeps the information private, and we get rid of the original names. We don't keep any other personal information about the students. The only thing we do keep is the text of the students' answers to assignments, because we need it for our grading service. This information is kept safe using Google’s secure system, known as OAuth2, which follows all the rules to make sure the information stays private. For a complete understanding of our commitment to privacy and the measures we take to ensure it, we encourage you to read our detailed privacy policy.

CoGrader finally allows educators to provide specific and timely feedback. In addition, it saves time and hassle, ensures consistency and accuracy in grading, reduces biases, and promotes academic integrity.

Soon, we'll indicate whether students have used ChatGPT or other AI systems for assignments, but achieving 100% accurate detection is not possible due to the complexity of human and AI-generated writing. Claims to the contrary are misinformation, as they overlook the nuanced nature of modern technology.

CoGrader uses cutting-edge generative AI algorithms that have undergone rigorous testing and human validation to ensure accuracy and consistency. In comparisons to manual grading, CoGrader typically shows only a small difference of up to ~5% in grades, often less than the variance between human graders. Some teachers have noted that this variance can be influenced by personal bias or the workload of grading. While CoGrader works hard to minimize errors and offer reliable results, it is always a good practice to review and validate the grades (and feedback) before submitting them.

CoGrader is designed to assist educators by streamlining the grading process with AI-driven suggestions. However, the final feedback and grades remain the responsibility of the educator. While CoGrader aims for accuracy and fairness, it should be used as an aid, not a replacement, for professional judgment. Educators should review and validate the grades and feedback before finalizing results. The use of CoGrader constitutes acceptance of these terms, and we expressly disclaim any liability for errors or inconsistencies. The final grading decision always rests with the educator.

Just try it out! We'll guide you along the way. If you have any questions, we're here to help. Once you're in, you'll experience saving countless hours and procrastination, and make grading efficient, fair, and helpful.

The GRE ® General Test

One test for graduate, business and law school

Select a step to learn more about your GRE ® General Test journey.

Analytical Writing Measure Scoring

Score level descriptions for the analytical writing measure.

The reported Analytical Writing score ranges from 0 to 6, in half-point increments.

The statements below describe, for each score level, the overall quality of analytical writing demonstrated. The test assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills (the ability to reason, assemble evidence to develop a position and communicate complex ideas) along with your control of grammar and the mechanics of writing.

Scores 6 and 5.5

Sustains insightful, in-depth analysis of complex ideas; develops and supports main points with logically compelling reasons and/or highly persuasive examples; is well focused and well organized; skillfully uses sentence variety and precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively; demonstrates superior facility with sentence structure and usage, but may have minor errors that do not interfere with meaning.

Scores 5 and 4.5

Provides generally thoughtful analysis of complex ideas; develops and supports main points with logically sound reasons and/or well-chosen examples; is generally focused and well organized; uses sentence variety and vocabulary to convey meaning clearly; demonstrates good control of sentence structure and usage, but may have minor errors that do not interfere with meaning.

Scores 4 and 3.5

Provides competent analysis of ideas in addressing specific task directions; develops and supports main points with relevant reasons and/or examples; is adequately organized; conveys meaning with acceptable clarity; demonstrates satisfactory control of sentence structure and usage, but may have some errors that affect clarity.

Scores 3 and 2.5

Displays some competence in analytical writing and addressing specific task directions, although the writing is flawed in at least one of the following ways: limited analysis or development; weak organization; weak control of sentence structure or usage, with errors that often result in vagueness or a lack of clarity.

Scores 2 and 1.5

Displays serious weaknesses in analytical writing. The writing is seriously flawed in at least one of the following ways: serious lack of analysis or development; unclear in addressing specific task directions; lack of organization; frequent problems in sentence structure or usage, with errors that obscure meaning.

Scores 1 and 0.5

Displays fundamental deficiencies in analytical writing. The writing is fundamentally flawed in at least one of the following ways: content that is extremely confusing or mostly irrelevant to the assigned tasks; little or no development; severe and pervasive errors that result in incoherence.

Your analytical writing skills cannot be evaluated because the response does not address any part of the assigned task(s), merely attempts to copy the assignments, is in a foreign language or displays only indecipherable text.

You produced no text whatsoever

“Analyze an Issue” task scoring guide

Score 6 outstanding.

In addressing the specific task directions, a 6 response presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.

A typical response in this category:

• articulates a clear and insightful position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task
• develops the position fully with compelling reasons and/or persuasive examples
• sustains a well-focused, well-organized analysis, connecting ideas logically
• conveys ideas fluently and precisely, using effective vocabulary and sentence variety
• demonstrates superior facility with the conventions of standard written English (i.e., grammar, usage and mechanics), but may have minor errors

Score 5 Strong

In addressing the specific task directions, a 5 response presents a generally thoughtful, well-developed analysis of the issue and conveys meaning clearly.

• presents a clear and well-considered position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task
• develops the position with logically sound reasons and/or well-chosen examples
• is focused and generally well organized, connecting ideas appropriately
• conveys ideas clearly and well, using appropriate vocabulary and sentence variety
• demonstrates facility with the conventions of standard written English, but may have minor errors

Score 4 Adequate

In addressing the specific task directions, a 4 response presents a competent analysis of the issue and conveys meaning with acceptable clarity.

• presents a clear position on the issue in accordance with the assigned task
• develops the position with relevant reasons and/or examples
• is adequately focused and organized
• demonstrates sufficient control of language to express ideas with acceptable clarity
• generally demonstrates control of the conventions of standard written English, but may have some errors

Score 3 Limited

A 3 response demonstrates some competence in addressing the specific task directions, in analyzing the issue and in conveying meaning, but is obviously flawed.

A typical response in this category exhibits  one or more of the following characteristics:

• is vague or limited in addressing the specific task directions and in presenting or developing a position on the issue or both
• is weak in the use of relevant reasons or examples or relies largely on unsupported claims
• is limited in focus and/or organization
• has problems in language and sentence structure that result in a lack of clarity
• contains occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage or mechanics that can interfere with meaning

Score 2 Seriously Flawed

A 2 response largely disregards the specific task directions and/or demonstrates serious weaknesses in analytical writing.

• is unclear or seriously limited in addressing the specific task directions and in presenting or developing a position on the issue or both
• provides few, if any, relevant reasons or examples in support of its claims
• is poorly focused and/or poorly organized
• has serious problems in language and sentence structure that frequently interfere with meaning
• contains serious errors in grammar, usage or mechanics that frequently obscure meaning

Score 1 Fundamentally Deficient

A 1 response demonstrates fundamental deficiencies in analytical writing.

• provides little or no evidence of understanding the issue
• provides little or no evidence of the ability to develop an organized response (e.g., is disorganized and/or extremely brief)
• has severe problems in language and sentence structure that persistently interfere with meaning
• contains pervasive errors in grammar, usage or mechanics that result in incoherence

Off topic (i.e., provides no evidence of an attempt to address the assigned topic), is in a foreign language, merely copies the topic, consists of only keystroke characters or is illegible or nonverbal.

The essay response is blank.

“Analyze an Argument” task scoring guide (for General Tests administered before September 22, 2023)

In addressing the specific task directions, a 6 response presents a cogent, well-articulated examination of the argument and conveys meaning skillfully.

• clearly identifies aspects of the argument relevant to the assigned task and examines them insightfully
• develops ideas cogently, organizes them logically and connects them with clear transitions
• provides compelling and thorough support for its main points

In addressing the specific task directions, a 5 response presents a generally thoughtful, well-developed examination of the argument and conveys meaning clearly.

• clearly identifies aspects of the argument relevant to the assigned task and examines them in a generally perceptive way
• develops ideas clearly, organizes them logically and connects them with appropriate transitions
• offers generally thoughtful and thorough support for its main points

In addressing the specific task directions, a 4 response presents a competent examination of the argument and conveys meaning with acceptable clarity.

• identifies and examines aspects of the argument relevant to the assigned task, but may also discuss some extraneous points
• develops and organizes ideas satisfactorily, but may not connect them with transitions
• supports its main points adequately, but may be uneven in its support
• demonstrates sufficient control of language to convey ideas with reasonable clarity

A 3 response demonstrates some competence in addressing the specific task directions, in examining the argument and in conveying meaning, but is obviously flawed.

• does not identify or examine most of the aspects of the argument relevant to the assigned task, although some relevant examination of the argument is present
• mainly discusses tangential or irrelevant matters, or reasons poorly
• is limited in the logical development and organization of ideas
• offers support of little relevance and value for its main points
• does not present an examination based on logical analysis, but may instead present the writer's own views on the subject
• does not follow the directions for the assigned task
• does not develop ideas, or is poorly organized and illogical
• provides little, if any, relevant or reasonable support for its main points
• provides little or no evidence of understanding the argument
• provides little evidence of the ability to develop an organized response (e.g., is disorganized and/or extremely brief)

Off topic (i.e., provides no evidence of an attempt to respond to the assigned topic), is in a foreign language, merely copies the topic, consists of only keystroke characters, or is illegible or nonverbal.

• [email protected]
• Get 21% OFF . Use the code: FIRST21

IB TOK Essay Rubric. Grading Criteria

As someone deeply immersed in the IB curriculum, I’ve encountered difficulty writing Theory of Knowledge (TOK) essays more times than I can count. Today, I’m here to tell you about the IB TOK essay rubric and grading criteria, offering insights I’ve gathered over the years. Trust me, understanding these elements can transform your TOK essay from good to exceptional.

What Is IB Theory of Knowledge Essay?

The International Baccalaureate TOK essay is a critical element of the IB Diploma Programme that pushes students to ponder the nature and acquisition of knowledge. This task requires students to examine and articulate their understanding of how we come to know what we claim to know, engaging them in a deep reflection on knowledge itself, its sources, and its application in various contexts.

This essay is a philosophical research that encourages critical thinking and analysis across different areas of knowledge, including ethics, science, mathematics, and the arts. At the heart of the IB TOK essay are several key components that students must know:

• The essay prompts students to reflect on the nature of knowledge and how we come to know what we claim to know. It is an exercise in critical thinking and philosophy, where students examine the bases of knowledge and how it intersects with the world around them.
• Students choose from a list of prescribed titles the IB organization releases annually. These titles prompt discussions on various topics in knowledge, ethics, science, mathematics, human sciences, and more.
• There is a maximum TOK essay word count of 1,600 words. This strict limit requires students to articulate their thoughts clearly and concisely.
• The essay is assessed using criteria that evaluate students’ ability to identify and research knowledge issues, contrast TOK key concepts , demonstrate critical thinking, and organize their ideas coherently.
• Students are encouraged to start early, select a topic that interests them, and engage in extensive research and critical thinking. Collaboration with TOK teachers for guidance and feedback throughout the writing process is also crucial.
• Through the TOK essay, students develop skills in critical thinking, analysis, synthesis of information from various disciplines, and the ability to argue coherently and persuasively.

The TOK essay and the TOK exhibition contribute up to three points towards the total score of the IB Diploma. The performance in TOK is combined with the Extended Essay (EE) to determine the number of additional points awarded.

You Might Also Like:

• November 2024 TOK Essay Titles
• TOK Exhibition Word Count
• TOK Essay Word Count
• How to Write TOK Essay in One Week
• IB TOK Essay Structure in Detail
• AOKs in IB TOK
• 12 TOK Key Concepts with Examples
• The Human Sciences AOK in TOK
• The Natural Sciences AOK and Its Significance in TOK

IB Theory of Knowledge Essay Rubric

As an IB writer and mentor, I’ve seen these guidelines as a checklist and a map for writing insightful, coherent works in the IB Theory of Knowledge . My goal here is to explain these criteria.

Addressing the Knowledge Question (0-2 points)

A central component of the TOK essay is its focus on a knowledge question directly related to the chosen title. This question must be explicitly identified early in the essay as a foundation for your analysis and arguments. The clarity with which you state this question and the extent to which it informs the development of your essay is crucial for scoring in this category.

Grasping Knowledge Issues (0-2 points)

Your essay must profoundly comprehend the knowledge issues connected to your central knowledge question. It includes recognizing the diverse methods through which knowledge is obtained and acknowledging the potential limitations and biases influencing our perception of the world. A high score in this area reflects your ability to dig into these complexities and present them thoughtfully within your essay.

Critical Analysis and Evaluation (0-2 points)

A critical dissection and assessment of the knowledge question are imperative in your TOK essay. It involves using relevant examples and evidence to bolster your arguments alongside a meticulous examination of the various approaches to knowledge, highlighting their strengths and pitfalls. Additionally, it includes appraising the comparative worth of these different approaches and showcasing your ability to engage with the question at hand critically.

Incorporating AOKs and WOKs (0-2 points)

our essay must showcase an adept understanding of the multifaceted nature in which knowledge is acquired, highlighting the roles of empirical evidence, logical deduction, and personal experiences. Equally important is demonstrating a thorough grasp of the various Ways of Knowing (WOKs) — including reason, emotion, perception, and language — and articulating how these intersect and interact with the central knowledge question. A high score in this criterion indicates a comprehensive integration and consideration of AOKs and WOKs in your analysis.

Demonstrating Personal Engagement (0-2 points)

Your TOK essay should vividly reflect your connection and engagement with the knowledge question. It should show your awareness of how the arguments presented resonate with your experiences and perceptions and their broader implications for the world you inhabit. Achieving high marks in this area means successfully conveying how researching the knowledge question has influenced your understanding and perspective, integrating personal insight with academic analysis.

Coherence and Structure (0-2 points)

A well-written TOK essay is characterized by its organization and clarity, featuring a distinct introduction, body, and conclusion. The arrangement should be logical and enhance the essay’s central argument, ensuring a seamless flow of ideas from start to finish. High scores in this domain are awarded to essays demonstrating meticulous planning and an ability to guide the reader.

Clarity in Presentation (0-2 points)

Your TOK essay should be articulated clearly, concisely, and well-structured, paying close attention to the accuracy of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It is also essential to adhere to the proper referencing and citation style throughout the document. Essays that score well in this category prioritize readability and scholarly integrity, making it easy for the reader to follow and appreciate the depth of the analysis. So, follow the IB TOK essay structure in detail.

Innovative Approach and Creativity (0-2 points)

Your TOK essay should exhibit originality and inventiveness in addressing the knowledge question and selecting examples and evidence to bolster your arguments. High-scoring essays in this category are characterized by their creative insights and the ability to think outside the box, demonstrating a proactive approach to elucidating the knowledge question.

Get Help With Your Paper

Ib tok essay grading criteria explained.

The grading criteria for the TOK essay follow a holistic approach, considering all aspects of the rubric. Essays are marked on a scale, with each level reflecting a range of performance in the criteria mentioned above. Here are some insights:

• Excellent Performance . Essays in this category exhibit a deep understanding of knowledge issues, sophisticated analysis, and clear, coherent organization. They effectively incorporate multiple perspectives and are enriched with well-integrated examples.
• Good Performance . These essays demonstrate a good understanding and analysis of knowledge issues, though they may lack the depth or coherence of the top-tier essays. The organization is solid, and examples are used effectively, though perhaps with less sophistication.
• Satisfactory Performance . Here, essays adequately understand the knowledge issues but may struggle with in-depth analysis or coherent organization. Using examples and considering different perspectives is present but not fully developed.
• Basic Performance . Essays in this range have a basic grasp of the knowledge issues but significant weaknesses in analysis, organization, and examples. They may overlook essential perspectives or implications.

From my experience, the key to excelling under these grading criteria lies in understanding what each criterion asks for and integrating these elements into a cohesive, compelling narrative. Crafting your essay with an awareness of these grading nuances can elevate your work from satisfactory to exceptional.

Passing Grade for the Theory of Knowledge Essay

The TOK essay and the TOK presentation form part of the core of the IB Diploma Programme, and students must pass both components to receive their diploma. The TOK essay and presentation are graded on a letter scale of A (excellent) to E (elementary), with D considered a passing grade. However, it’s important to remember that the final TOK grade is combined with the Extended Essay grade, which can significantly impact your overall diploma points.

You generally need to avoid receiving an E grade to pass the TOK component. The combined points for TOK and the EE can contribute up to 3 bonus points towards your diploma, depending on their combined quality. Scores are determined by a matrix that the IB updates periodically, so aiming for the highest possible grades in TOK and EE is crucial to maximizing your diploma points.

Remember, the specific criteria for passing can vary slightly with changes to the IB curriculum and assessment guides, so it’s always a good idea to consult the latest materials or speak with your TOK teacher for the most current information.

In summary, passing the TOK essay requires a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge issues, a critical and reflective approach to the essay question, and a commitment to articulate your thoughts clearly and coherently.

So, mastering the IB TOK essay rubric and grading criteria is a worthwhile path. It’s not just about securing high marks; it’s about developing a nuanced understanding of knowledge. As you prepare to tackle your TOK essay, carry with you the insights and strategies shared.

So, start early, seek feedback, and let your understanding of the rubric infuse every paragraph of your essay. With the right approach, the TOK essay expands your horizons of learning. Good luck, and remember, our experts are always by your side and can  help you with the TOK essay .

Valerie Green

Valerie Green is a dedicated educator who spends her time helping high school and college students succeed. She writes articles and guides for various online education projects, providing students with the tools they need to excel in their studies. Friendly and approachable, she is committed to making a difference in the lives of students.

IB Paper 1 Writing Guide

As an experienced IB writer, I’ve compiled this complete guide to help you feel strong as you take on this critical part of the IB Diploma Programme. This article details the methods and skills you need to ace Paper 1, from understanding how the test is set up and choosing the right texts.

IB Economics IA Article Suggestions 2024/2025

When IB students start their Economics Internal Assessment (IA), it’s important for them to pick an interesting topic. For the school years 2024/2025, we will consider many different areas of economics, ranging from the rise of inflation to the changing nature of global trade.

What Are the Easiest and Hardest Extended Essay Subjects?

In this article, we discuss the easiest and hardest extended essay subjects, providing insights to help you make an informed decision. From the creative freedom found in the Arts to the demanding nature of the Experimental Sciences, we break down into what makes a subject approachable or daunting.

Failed Your Extended Essay? What to Do?

In this article, I’ll consider the immediate steps you should take after receiving an EE score that didn’t meet your expectations. We’ll discuss how to analyze feedback effectively, manage your emotions, and consider whether a retake is the right choice for you. If a retake isn’t feasible, we’ll look at alternative paths that can still lead you to diploma success.

What to Do If You Fail Your TOK Essay?

Failing your TOK essay can be disheartening, but it’s not the end of your IB path. As a seasoned IB writer, I understand the intricacies of the TOK essay and the common pitfalls students face. In this article, I’ll guide you through practical steps to reassess, revise, and rebound from a failing grade.

What to Do if You Don’t Pass Your IB IA and How to Succeed Next Time

Overcoming the challenges of failing an IB Internal Assessment can be daunting, but it’s not the end of your academic path. This article provides a comprehensive guide on the immediate actions to take if you don’t pass your IA, including analyzing feedback and consulting with your teachers. We’ll discuss opportunities for resubmission, the strategies for improving your work, and long-term tactics to prevent similar setbacks.

© 2024  I Bstudenthelp.com. This website is owned and operated by Udeepi OU Harju maakond, Tallinn, Lasnamäe linnaosa, Sepapaja tn 6, 15551. Disclaimer : Services we provide are only to assist the buyer like a guideline to complete any kind of writing assignment. Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions Cookie Policy Revision Policy Refund Policy