blog assignment rubric

A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs

PDF version for printing

University of Wisconsin - Stout — Schedule of Online Courses, Online Certificate Programs, and Graduate Degree

Readings on Authentic Assessment  

Examples of Other Rubrics

Higher Ed and Technology: Academics at Chapman

Building a Better Blog Rubric for faculty assigning student blogposts

April 7, 2017

One of the greatest challenges of giving online writing assignments to students is insuring that it’s clear how they will be evaluated for these types of assignments.  My colleague Mark Marino from USC recently shared his blog assignment rubric and I am going to use this as a springboard for my own blog assignments in the future.  I especially like that he evaluates the students on the how well they use the technology as well as on the content and style of their writing.

Mark Marino’s Blog Assignment Rubric

If you would like to tweak this rubric for yourself, you can make a “copy” that you can edit, but selecting the Make Copy option from the file menu, or you can also select to download it as a Word document:

It’s also worth noting that here at Chapman we provide a WordPress-based blogging platform for all faculty to use in their courses, called EduBlogs .  If you are interested in learning how you can set this up for your courses, please send a request to acadtechATchapman.edu, or fill out this FORM .

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Ready-made Blogging Rubrics for Teachers

By Med Kharbach, PhD | Last Update: May 16, 2024

Integrating blogging in your teaching will definitely boost your instructional methodologies and enhance your students learning. The pedagogical benefits of blogging in education is well documented in the literature . More and more teachers and educators are embracing the educational affordances of this digital medium in their instruction.

Blogging can help students develop and hone in their digital literacy skills. It also provides them with a powerful medium for self-expression and reflective thought. Knowing that their work will be seen and read by people beyond their classroom, students’ levels of motivation, focus, and dedication increase driving them to invest more time to improve their writing and search skills.

Blogging also empowers students voice and provides them with authentic audience to interact with.  Whether it is to showcase their learning, share creative writing projects, publish stories and biographies, engage in educational video projects, blogging has the potential to transform students learning and create authentic learning experiences.

However, for blogging to be pedagogically effective and to add value to your teaching practices , it needs to be conceptualized within a well-defined pedagogical framework. This framework, as I argued in a previous post, should speak to five main areas:  learning objectives, students-generated blogging rules, digital citizenship and copyright, choice of blogging platform , and blogging rubrics. Check out teachers blogging framework to learn more.

In this post, I want to specifically focus on the last element of the blogging framework: blogging rubrics. For your  educational blogging experience to be pedagogically sound, you need to design a blogging rubric that clearly outlines the skills you want your students to develop together with the evaluative criteria you will be using to assess students blogging activities. 

To help you get started creating your own blogging rubric, I compiled for you this list of resources featuring sample blogging rubrics created by other teachers and educators. Check them out for inspiration and ideas to include in your own rubrics.

1- A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs , by University of Wisconsin-Stout

I have been recommending this rubric to teachers for many years now. This rubric is based on a number of criteria including: Content and Creativity, Voice, Text layout, Use of Graphics and Multimedia, Timeliness and Tags, Citations,  Quality of Writing, and Proofreading.

2- Blogging rubrics by Teachers Pay Teachers

Check out this page in Teachers Pay Teachers where you will have access to a wide variety of teacher-created blogging rubrics all of which are offered for a low cost. These include: Blog Post Rubric (by Classroom Share), Creating A Blog Assignment+Rubric (by Frankie Says Learn), Blog Project Editable Rubric Distance Learning (by Education with DocRunning), Blogging Rubric: Score Students on Their Posts, Comments and Conventions (by Cleverly Bearly), and many more,.

3- Rubrics provided by University of Houston

The folks in the College of Technology in the University of Houston offer this collection of helpful rubrics to use in your teaching.These materials are in Word files and cover topics such as: blog assignment rubric, critical thinking rubric, discussion board rubric, problem solving rubric, research paper rubric, teamwork rubric, writing assignment rubric, discussion board rubric, and many more.

4- Rubrics by topic , The Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul

The Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul offers this collection of helpful rubrics covering three broad areas: Intellectual and Practical Skills (includes inquiry and analysis rubrics, oral communication rubric, written communication rubric, information literacy rubric, and more), Personal and Social Responsibility (includes ethical reasoning rubric, global learning rubric, civic knowledge and engagement, and more), and Integrative and Applied Learning (includes integrative and applied learning).

5- Blog rubric-Middle school

This blog rubric created by Clarity Innovations and accessible through OER Commons is designed specifically for middle school students to self-assess their blogs. The rubric covers the following areas: purpose, content, sources, audience, voice, writing, updates, extra features, and creativity. This rubric is also available to export to Google Docs.

More sources:

• Types of rubrics and how to create them (University of DePaul)
• What are grading rubrics (South Plains College)
• Rubrics: Do’s and Don’ts (by Larry Ferlazzo for Edweek)
• Blog Rubric (by Dr. Naomi Johnson Dr. Heather Lettner-Rus)

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Meet Med Kharbach, PhD

Dr. Med Kharbach is an influential voice in the global educational technology landscape, with an extensive background in educational studies and a decade-long experience as a K-12 teacher. Holding a Ph.D. from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, he brings a unique perspective to the educational world by integrating his profound academic knowledge with his hands-on teaching experience. Dr. Kharbach's academic pursuits encompass curriculum studies, discourse analysis, language learning/teaching, language and identity, emerging literacies, educational technology, and research methodologies. His work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in various esteemed academic journals.

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iRubric: Creating a Blog rubric

• blog, reflection, media content
• Social Sciences

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 (Spring 2024)
• Workshop Registration

Step 1: Analyze the assignment

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

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

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

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

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

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

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

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

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

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

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

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

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

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

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

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

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

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

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

Step 5: Design the rating scale

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

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

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

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

Building a rubric from scratch

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

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

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

Well-written descriptions:

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

Step 7: Create your rubric

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

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

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

• Teacher assistants

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

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

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

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

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

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

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

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

General Blog Rubric

Here are some general notes on how we’ll be grading blogs, but see the specific assignment for extra requirements.

How to Write a Blog Post Blog posts are meant to be well-written, both thoughtful and thought-provoking; the best ones will also stimulate discussion on the course site and in the classroom. Feel free to end your post with questions you haven’t answered yet or would like to hear your classmates answer; also consider embedding relevant pictures and other media in your posts. Recording a video or audio blog to Youtube and then embedding it into a blog post on our course site is also allowed. The grading rubric for blogging (below) takes effort into account. Although there’s not a hard and fast rule as to blog length, most blogs should be at least 300 words and/or 2-3 paragraphs long, and you want most of your post to be content–don’t waste time on empty statements and repetition.

The best blog posts will both demonstrate you’ve done the reading and show you have understood and analyzed it. Blogs should never be a summary of what you’ve read or heard; if you’re writing in response to a reading or lecture, your blogs should consist of a) analysis and reaction and criticism of that content, or b) how the readings apply to our larger questions of defining literature and digital literature and considering what happens to literature as it changes from one medium to another. Images and videos are awesome, but they should be classroom-appropriate. Blog Grading Rubric Blogs will be graded on the following scale:

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Creating rubrics for effective assessment management

How this will help:

Regardless of whether your course is online or face to face, you will need to provide feedback to your students on their strengths and areas for growth. Rubrics are one way to simplify the process of providing feedback and consistent grades to your students.

What are rubrics?

Rubrics are “scoring sheets” for learning tasks. There are multiple flavors of rubrics, but they all articulate two key variables for scoring how successful the learner has been in completing a specific task: the criteria for evaluation and the levels of performance. While you may have used rubrics in your face-to-face class, rubrics become essential when teaching online. Rubrics will not only save you time (a lot of time) when grading assignments, but they also help clarify expectations about how you are assessing students and why they received a particular grade. It also makes grading feel more objective to students (“I see what I did wrong here”), rather than subjective (“The teacher doesn’t like me and that’s why I got this grade.”). 

When designing a rubric, ideally, the criteria for evaluation need to be aligned with the learning objectives [link to learning objectives] of the task. For example, if an instructor asks their learners to create an annotated bibliography for a research assignment, we can imagine that the instructor wants to give the students practice with identifying valid sources on their research topic, citing sources correctly (using the appropriate format), and summarizing sources appropriately. The criteria for evaluation in a rubric for that task might be

• Quality of sources
• Accuracy of citation format for each source type
• Coherence of summaries
• Accuracy of summaries

The levels of performance don’t necessarily have a scale they must align with. Some rubric types might use a typical letter grading scale for their levels – these rubrics often include language like “An A-level response will….” Other rubric types have very few levels of performance; sometimes they are as simple as a binary scale – complete or incomplete (a checklist is an example of this kind of rubric). How an instructor thinks about the levels of performance in a rubric is going to depend on a number of factors, including their own personal preferences and approaches to evaluating student work, and on how the task is being used in the learning experience. If a task is not going to contribute to the final grade for the course, it might not be necessary (or make sense) to provide many fine-grained levels of performance. On the other hand, an assignment that is designed to provide detailed information to the instructor as to how proficient each student is at a set of skills might need many, highly specific levels of performance. At the end of this module, we provide examples of different types of rubrics and structures for levels of performance.

What teaching goals can rubrics help meet?

In an online course, clear communication from the instructor about their expectations is critical for student success and success of the course. Effective feedback, where it is clear to the learner what they have already mastered and where there are gaps in the learners knowledge or skills, is necessary for deep learning. Rubrics help an instructor clearly explain their expectations to the class as a whole while also making it easier to give individual students specific feedback on their learning.

Although one of the practical advantages to using rubrics is to make grading of submitted assignments more efficient, they can be used for many, not mutually exclusive, purposes:

• highlighting growth of a students’ skills or knowledge over time
• articulating to learners the important features of a high-quality submission
• assessing student participation in discussion forums
• guiding student self-assessments 
• guiding student peer-reviews
• providing feedback on ungraded or practice assignments to help students identify where they need to focus their learning efforts.

Examples of different rubrics

Different styles of rubrics are better fits for different task-types and for fulfilling the different teaching aims of a rubric . Here we focus on four different styles with varying levels of complexity: single point rubric, Specific task rubrics, general rubrics, holistic rubrics and analytical rubrics (Arter, J. A., & Chappuis, J., 2007).

Single point rubric

Sometimes, simple is easiest. A single point rubric can tell students whether they met the expectations of the criteria or not. We’d generally recommend not using too many criteria with single point rubrics, they aren’t meant for complicated evaluation. They are great for short assignments like discussion posts.

Example task : Write a 250 discussion post reflecting on the purpose of this week’s readings. (20 points)

Example rubric:

Specific task rubric

This style of rubric is useful for articulating the knowledge and skill objectives (and their respective levels) of a specific assignment.

Example task:

Design and build a trebuchet that is adjustable to launch a 

• 5g weight a distance of 0.5m
• 7g weight a distance of 0.5m
• 10g weight a distance of 0.75m

Holistic rubric

This style of rubric enables a single, overall assessment/evaluation of a learner’s performance on a task

Write a historical research paper discussing ….

( Adapted from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/rubrics.htm#versus )

General rubric

This style of rubric can be used for multiple, similar assignments to show growth (achieved and opportunities) over time.

Write a blog post appropriate for a specific audience exploring the themes of the reading for this week.

(Adapted from http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196 )

Analytic rubric

This style of rubric is well suited to breaking apart a complex task into component skills and allows for evaluation of those components. It can also help determine the grade for the whole assignment based on performance on the component skills. This style of rubric can look similar to a general rubric but includes detailed grading information.

( Adapted from http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196 )

Designing your own rubric

You can approach designing a rubric from multiple angles. Here we outline just one possible procedure to get started. This approach assumes the learning task is graded, but it can be generalized for other structures for levels of performance. 

• Start with the, “I know it when I see it,” principle. Most instructors have a sense of what makes a reasonable response to a task, even if they haven’t explicitly named those traits before. Write out as many traits of a “meets expectations” response as you can come up with – these will be your first draft of the criteria for learning.
• For each type of criterion, describe what an “A” response looks like. This will be your top level of performance.
• For complicated projects, consider moving systematically down each whole-grade level (B, C, D, F),  describe, in terms parallel to how you described the best response, what student responses at that level often look like. Or, for more simple assignments, create very simple rubrics – either the criterion was achieved or not. Rubrics do not have to be complicated [link to single point rubric]! 
• Share the rubric with a colleague to get feedback or “play test” the rubric using past student work if possible. 
• After grading some student responses with it, you may be tempted to fine-tune some details. However, this is not recommended. For one, Canvas will not allow you to change a rubric once it has been used for grading. But it is also not recommended to change the metrics of grading after students have already been using a rubric to work from. If you find that your rubric is grading students too harshly on a particular criterion, Also, make sure you track what changes you want to make. You may want to adjust your future course rubrics or at least for the next iteration of the task or course.

Practical Tips

• Creating learning objectives for each task, as you design the task, helps to ensure there is alignment between your learning activities and assessments and your course level learning objectives. It also gives a head start for the design of the rubric.
• When creating a rubric, start with just a few levels of performance. It is easier to expand a rubric to include more specificity in the levels of performance than it is to shrink the number of levels. Smaller rubrics are much easier for the instructor to navigate to provide feedback.
• Using a rubric will (likely) not eliminate the need for qualitative feedback to each student, but keeping a document of commonly used responses to students that you can copy and paste from can make the feedback process even more efficient.
• Explicitly have students self-assess their task prior to submitting it. For example, when students submit a paper online, have them include a short (100 word or less) reflection on what they think they did well on the paper, and what they struggled with. That step seems obvious to experts (i.e. instructors) but isn’t obvious to all learners. If students make a habit of this, they will often end up with higher grades because they catch their mistakes before they submit their response(s).
• Canvas and other learning management systems (LMS) have tools that allow you to create point and click rubrics. You can choose to have the tools automatically enter grades into the LMS grade book.
• Rubrics can be used for students to self-evaluate their own performance or to provide feedback to peers.

University of Michigan

CRLT – Sample lab rubrics

Cult of Pedagogy – The single point rubric

Other Resources

The Chronicle of Higher Ed – A rubric for evaluating student blogs

Canvas – Creating a rubric in Canvas

Jon Mueller – Authentic assessment toolkit

Arter, J. A., & Chappuis, J. (2007). Creating & recognizing quality rubrics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Gilbert, P. K., & Dabbagh, N. (2004). How to structure online discussions for meaningful discourse: a case study. British Journal of Educational Technology , 36 (1), 5–18. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2005.00434.x

Wyss, V. L., Freedman, D., & Siebert, C. J. (2014). The Development of a Discussion Rubric for Online Courses: Standardizing Expectations of Graduate Students in Online Scholarly Discussions. TechTrends , 58 (2), 99–107. doi: 10.1007/s11528-014-0741-x

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Blog Grading Rubric

Blogging Sequence Grading Rubric

(50 points for each post)

Blog #_____ Student Name: _____________________________ PF Name___________________________

Blog posts will be graded less rigorously than other assignments; they are intended to be low-stakes writing and reflection exercises. Use the rubric below as a guide to assigning blog grades by deducting points according to the criteria and categories below.

Blog Score: _______

• About WordPress
• Get Involved
• WordPress.org
• Documentation
• Learn WordPress

McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning

Blogging assignments.

A blog is an online journaling or communication tool to which new entries, or ‘posts’ are regularly added.  In a teaching context, a blog can serve as a simple website showcasing student work or can take advantage of characteristics that are unique to the blog medium, such as comments, tags, categories. Blogs are built to display content in dynamic ways: they are perhaps most often displayed chronologically, but they can just as easily be organized and displayed based on author, month, category or tag. As a teaching tool, blogs can provide an alternative to the perhaps more formal term paper, can foster a sense of learning community, and provide a platform for project-based learning.

Learning goals

• Provide opportunities for students to demonstrate what they know and to make curatorial decisions about how to convey that information
• Give students the opportunity to write for new audiences. Blogs can be restricted to participants of the course or make public on the Web. Writing for a public audience, that may include parents, students at partner institutions, or experts in the field, is a very different experience than writing for an audience of one’s peers or writing specifically for the instructor.
• Foster a sense of learning community through project-based learning

Considerations

• Tags are a characteristic feature of blogging platforms. These short, usually one word, descriptions of a post’s content can be used to organize materials on the website, but also as a way for students to concisely summarize topics, forge connections between their peers’ work and their own, and identify broader themes in the class. Using this information, you can generate a ‘tag cloud,’ which visualizes the relative popularity of each tag and can act as a navigational element to the blog posts.
• Blogs store information in a very modular and flexible way and can be used to host a wide variety of projects. For example, a blog can function as a simple archive or collection. The features you might look for in an online collection, such as galleries of images and descriptions or categorized lists of objects, are built into the blogging platform.
• Blog posts and pages contain an optional threaded commenting feature. Any content posted to a blog can be commented upon. Requiring students to comment upon each other’s posts is often an important part of a blogging assignment. Keep in mind however that students are unlikely to comment on their peer’s work voluntarily. If commenting is part of an assignment, it should be required and should contribute to their grade.
• A blog in its basic form is a way to share up-to-the-minute news stories. In a Journalism course, this may be perfectly appropriate. The same idea however can equally apply to student responses to recurring course events, such as lectures, readings, or chapters in a book.
• In constructing your assignments, think about what it is you want students to get from blogging and what you are going to value in terms of grading their writing. A blogging assignment can mushroom into a lot of text for you to read and grade. For this reason, some careful planning and a clear and concise rubric can make your life a lot easier when it comes time to grade blog posts.

Student preparation

The McGraw Commons course blogging platform, an instance of the WordPress blogging platform specifically for coursework, is easy to use, but might require some instruction.  The McGraw Center makes available written documentation on the use of the system, but be prepared also to set aside 15-30 minutes of class time for instruction by a staff member from the McGraw Center.

Possible tools

• McGraw Commons

Rubrics and resources

• 7 things you should know about blogs , Educause
• Using Blogging as a Learning Tool . The Innovative Instructor Blog, Center for Educational Resources, Johns Hopkins University
• University of Wisconsin – Stout, A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs
• University of Maryland, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, General Blog Rubric
• Beyond George Street blog, College of Charleston, Blog Grading Rubric

Example Blogs

Center for Teaching Innovation

Resource library.

• AACU VALUE Rubrics

Using rubrics

A rubric is a type of scoring guide that assesses and articulates specific components and expectations for an assignment. Rubrics can be used for a variety of assignments: research papers, group projects, portfolios, and presentations.  

Why use rubrics? 

Rubrics help instructors: 

• Assess assignments consistently from student-to-student. 
• Save time in grading, both short-term and long-term. 
• Give timely, effective feedback and promote student learning in a sustainable way. 
• Clarify expectations and components of an assignment for both students and course teaching assistants (TAs). 
• Refine teaching methods by evaluating rubric results. 

Rubrics help students: 

• Understand expectations and components of an assignment. 
• Become more aware of their learning process and progress. 
• Improve work through timely and detailed feedback. 

Considerations for using rubrics 

When developing rubrics consider the following:

• Although it takes time to build a rubric, time will be saved in the long run as grading and providing feedback on student work will become more streamlined.  
• A rubric can be a fillable pdf that can easily be emailed to students. 
• They can be used for oral presentations. 
• They are a great tool to evaluate teamwork and individual contribution to group tasks. 
• Rubrics facilitate peer-review by setting evaluation standards. Have students use the rubric to provide peer assessment on various drafts. 
• Students can use them for self-assessment to improve personal performance and learning. Encourage students to use the rubrics to assess their own work. 
• Motivate students to improve their work by using rubric feedback to resubmit their work incorporating the feedback. 

Getting Started with Rubrics 

• Start small by creating one rubric for one assignment in a semester.  
• Ask colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments or adapt rubrics that are available online. For example, the  AACU has rubrics  for topics such as written and oral communication, critical thinking, and creative thinking. RubiStar helps you to develop your rubric based on templates.  
• Examine an assignment for your course. Outline the elements or critical attributes to be evaluated (these attributes must be objectively measurable). 
• Create an evaluative range for performance quality under each element; for instance, “excellent,” “good,” “unsatisfactory.” 
• Avoid using subjective or vague criteria such as “interesting” or “creative.” Instead, outline objective indicators that would fall under these categories. 
• The criteria must clearly differentiate one performance level from another. 
• Assign a numerical scale to each level. 
• Give a draft of the rubric to your colleagues and/or TAs for feedback. 
• Train students to use your rubric and solicit feedback. This will help you judge whether the rubric is clear to them and will identify any weaknesses. 
• Rework the rubric based on the feedback. 

How to Use Rubrics

A rubric is a document that describes the criteria by which students’ assignments are graded. Rubrics can be helpful for:

• Making grading faster and more consistent (reducing potential bias). 
• Communicating your expectations for an assignment to students before they begin. 

Moreover, for assignments whose criteria are more subjective, the process of creating a rubric and articulating what it looks like to succeed at an assignment provides an opportunity to check for alignment with the intended learning outcomes and modify the assignment prompt, as needed.

Why rubrics?

Rubrics are best for assignments or projects that require evaluation on multiple dimensions. Creating a rubric makes the instructor’s standards explicit to both students and other teaching staff for the class, showing students how to meet expectations.

Additionally, the more comprehensive a rubric is, the more it allows for grading to be streamlined—students will get informative feedback about their performance from the rubric, even if they don’t have as many individualized comments. Grading can be more standardized and efficient across graders.

Finally, rubrics allow for reflection, as the instructor has to think about their standards and outcomes for the students. Using rubrics can help with self-directed learning in students as well, especially if rubrics are used to review students’ own work or their peers’, or if students are involved in creating the rubric.

How to design a rubric

1. consider the desired learning outcomes.

What learning outcomes is this assignment reinforcing and assessing? If the learning outcome seems “fuzzy,” iterate on the outcome by thinking about the expected student work product. This may help you more clearly articulate the learning outcome in a way that is measurable.  

2. Define criteria

What does a successful assignment submission look like? As described by Allen and Tanner (2006), it can help develop an initial list of categories that the student should demonstrate proficiency in by completing the assignment. These categories should correlate with the intended learning outcomes you identified in Step 1, although they may be more granular in some cases. For example, if the task assesses students’ ability to formulate an effective communication strategy, what components of their communication strategy will you be looking for? Talking with colleagues or looking at existing rubrics for similar tasks may give you ideas for categories to consider for evaluation.

If you have assigned this task to students before and have samples of student work, it can help create a qualitative observation guide. This is described in Linda Suskie’s book Assessing Student Learning , where she suggests thinking about what made you decide to give one assignment an A and another a C, as well as taking notes when grading assignments and looking for common patterns. The often repeated themes that you comment on may show what your goals and expectations for students are. An example of an observation guide used to take notes on predetermined areas of an assignment is shown here .

In summary, consider the following list of questions when defining criteria for a rubric (O’Reilly and Cyr, 2006):

• What do you want students to learn from the task?
• How will students demonstrate that they have learned?
• What knowledge, skills, and behaviors are required for the task?
• What steps are required for the task?
• What are the characteristics of the final product?

After developing an initial list of criteria, prioritize the most important skills you want to target and eliminate unessential criteria or combine similar skills into one group. Most rubrics have between 3 and 8 criteria. Rubrics that are too lengthy make it difficult to grade and challenging for students to understand the key skills they need to achieve for the given assignment. 

3. Create the rating scale

According to Suskie, you will want at least 3 performance levels: for adequate and inadequate performance, at the minimum, and an exemplary level to motivate students to strive for even better work. Rubrics often contain 5 levels, with an additional level between adequate and exemplary and a level between adequate and inadequate. Usually, no more than 5 levels are needed, as having too many rating levels can make it hard to consistently distinguish which rating to give an assignment (such as between a 6 or 7 out of 10). Suskie also suggests labeling each level with names to clarify which level represents the minimum acceptable performance. Labels will vary by assignment and subject, but some examples are: 

• Exceeds standard, meets standard, approaching standard, below standard
• Complete evidence, partial evidence, minimal evidence, no evidence

4. Fill in descriptors

Fill in descriptors for each criterion at each performance level. Expand on the list of criteria you developed in Step 2. Begin to write full descriptions, thinking about what an exemplary example would look like for students to strive towards. Avoid vague terms like “good” and make sure to use explicit, concrete terms to describe what would make a criterion good. For instance, a criterion called “organization and structure” would be more descriptive than “writing quality.” Describe measurable behavior and use parallel language for clarity; the wording for each criterion should be very similar, except for the degree to which standards are met. For example, in a sample rubric from Chapter 9 of Suskie’s book, the criterion of “persuasiveness” has the following descriptors:

• Well Done (5): Motivating questions and advance organizers convey the main idea. Information is accurate.
• Satisfactory (3-4): Includes persuasive information.
• Needs Improvement (1-2): Include persuasive information with few facts.
• Incomplete (0): Information is incomplete, out of date, or incorrect.

These sample descriptors generally have the same sentence structure that provides consistent language across performance levels and shows the degree to which each standard is met.

5. Test your rubric

Test your rubric using a range of student work to see if the rubric is realistic. You may also consider leaving room for aspects of the assignment, such as effort, originality, and creativity, to encourage students to go beyond the rubric. If there will be multiple instructors grading, it is important to calibrate the scoring by having all graders use the rubric to grade a selected set of student work and then discuss any differences in the scores. This process helps develop consistency in grading and making the grading more valid and reliable.

Types of Rubrics

If you would like to dive deeper into rubric terminology, this section is dedicated to discussing some of the different types of rubrics. However, regardless of the type of rubric you use, it’s still most important to focus first on your learning goals and think about how the rubric will help clarify students’ expectations and measure student progress towards those learning goals.

Depending on the nature of the assignment, rubrics can come in several varieties (Suskie, 2009):

Checklist Rubric

This is the simplest kind of rubric, which lists specific features or aspects of the assignment which may be present or absent. A checklist rubric does not involve the creation of a rating scale with descriptors. See example from 18.821 project-based math class .

Rating Scale Rubric

This is like a checklist rubric, but instead of merely noting the presence or absence of a feature or aspect of the assignment, the grader also rates quality (often on a graded or Likert-style scale). See example from 6.811 assistive technology class .

Descriptive Rubric

A descriptive rubric is like a rating scale, but including descriptions of what performing to a certain level on each scale looks like. Descriptive rubrics are particularly useful in communicating instructors’ expectations of performance to students and in creating consistency with multiple graders on an assignment. This kind of rubric is probably what most people think of when they imagine a rubric. See example from 15.279 communications class .

Holistic Scoring Guide

Unlike the first 3 types of rubrics, a holistic scoring guide describes performance at different levels (e.g., A-level performance, B-level performance) holistically without analyzing the assignment into several different scales. This kind of rubric is particularly useful when there are many assignments to grade and a moderate to a high degree of subjectivity in the assessment of quality. It can be difficult to have consistency across scores, and holistic scoring guides are most helpful when making decisions quickly rather than providing detailed feedback to students. See example from 11.229 advanced writing seminar .

The kind of rubric that is most appropriate will depend on the assignment in question.

Implementation tips

Rubrics are also available to use for Canvas assignments. See this resource from Boston College for more details and guides from Canvas Instructure.

Allen, D., & Tanner, K. (2006). Rubrics: Tools for Making Learning Goals and Evaluation Criteria Explicit for Both Teachers and Learners. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 5 (3), 197-203. doi:10.1187/cbe.06-06-0168

Cherie Miot Abbanat. 11.229 Advanced Writing Seminar. Spring 2004. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu . License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA .

Haynes Miller, Nat Stapleton, Saul Glasman, and Susan Ruff. 18.821 Project Laboratory in Mathematics. Spring 2013. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu . License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA .

Lori Breslow, and Terence Heagney. 15.279 Management Communication for Undergraduates. Fall 2012. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu . License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA .

O’Reilly, L., & Cyr, T. (2006). Creating a Rubric: An Online Tutorial for Faculty. Retrieved from https://www.ucdenver.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/center-for-faculty-development/Documents/Tutorials/Rubrics/index.htm

Suskie, L. (2009). Using a scoring guide or rubric to plan and evaluate an assessment. In Assessing student learning: A common sense guide (2nd edition, pp. 137-154 ) . Jossey-Bass.

William Li, Grace Teo, and Robert Miller. 6.811 Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology. Fall 2014. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu . License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA .

Assessment Rubrics

A rubric is commonly defined as a tool that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing criteria, and for each criteria, describing levels of quality (Andrade, 2000; Arter & Chappuis, 2007; Stiggins, 2001). Criteria are used in determining the level at which student work meets expectations. Markers of quality give students a clear idea about what must be done to demonstrate a certain level of mastery, understanding, or proficiency (i.e., "Exceeds Expectations" does xyz, "Meets Expectations" does only xy or yz, "Developing" does only x or y or z). Rubrics can be used for any assignment in a course, or for any way in which students are asked to demonstrate what they've learned. They can also be used to facilitate self and peer-reviews of student work.

Rubrics aren't just for summative evaluation. They can be used as a teaching tool as well. When used as part of a formative assessment, they can help students understand both the holistic nature and/or specific analytics of learning expected, the level of learning expected, and then make decisions about their current level of learning to inform revision and improvement (Reddy & Andrade, 2010). 

Why use rubrics?

Rubrics help instructors:

Provide students with feedback that is clear, directed and focused on ways to improve learning.

Demystify assignment expectations so students can focus on the work instead of guessing "what the instructor wants."

Reduce time spent on grading and develop consistency in how you evaluate student learning across students and throughout a class.

Rubrics help students:

Focus their efforts on completing assignments in line with clearly set expectations.

Self and Peer-reflect on their learning, making informed changes to achieve the desired learning level.

Developing a Rubric

During the process of developing a rubric, instructors might:

Select an assignment for your course - ideally one you identify as time intensive to grade, or students report as having unclear expectations.

Decide what you want students to demonstrate about their learning through that assignment. These are your criteria.

Identify the markers of quality on which you feel comfortable evaluating students’ level of learning - often along with a numerical scale (i.e., "Accomplished," "Emerging," "Beginning" for a developmental approach).

Give students the rubric ahead of time. Advise them to use it in guiding their completion of the assignment.

It can be overwhelming to create a rubric for every assignment in a class at once, so start by creating one rubric for one assignment. See how it goes and develop more from there! Also, do not reinvent the wheel. Rubric templates and examples exist all over the Internet, or consider asking colleagues if they have developed rubrics for similar assignments. 

Sample Rubrics

Examples of holistic and analytic rubrics : see Tables 2 & 3 in “Rubrics: Tools for Making Learning Goals and Evaluation Criteria Explicit for Both Teachers and Learners” (Allen & Tanner, 2006)

Examples across assessment types : see “Creating and Using Rubrics,” Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and & Educational Innovation

“VALUE Rubrics” : see the Association of American Colleges and Universities set of free, downloadable rubrics, with foci including creative thinking, problem solving, and information literacy. 

Andrade, H. 2000. Using rubrics to promote thinking and learning. Educational Leadership 57, no. 5: 13–18. Arter, J., and J. Chappuis. 2007. Creating and recognizing quality rubrics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall. Stiggins, R.J. 2001. Student-involved classroom assessment. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Reddy, Y., & Andrade, H. (2010). A review of rubric use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation In Higher Education, 35(4), 435-448.

Creating Effective Rubrics: Examples and Best Practices

• Classroom Activities/Strategies/Guides

Rubrics are an essential component of assessing student learning effectively. A rubric is a scoring guide that clearly defines the expectations for student performance on a particular task or assignment. Teachers can use rubrics to both evaluate a student’s performance level and to provide feedback to that student. Because they provide a standardized way to assess learning, rubrics help to ensure grading is fair and consistent across all students. 

It is important that rubrics are a clear, consistent evaluation of a student’s work. This can sometimes be hard to achieve because rubrics have the potential to become cumbersome and confusing. The best rubrics will typically include specific criteria relevant to the task or assignment at hand, as well as a set of descriptors that outline the different levels of performance that learners may achieve.

There are many different types and uses of rubrics, as well as many benefits of using rubrics. Therefore, learning how to create effective rubrics and the best practices for using rubrics is important for all educators to know. Some may think rubrics are only used in upper-level grades or only for essay assignments, but rubrics can be a beneficial tool for many different subjects and grade levels. All teachable content has learning goals and outcomes, and therefore all content can benefit from the use of good-quality rubrics.

Types of Rubrics

There are three main types of rubrics that are typically used in the education realm: analytic, holistic, and developmental. These three rubrics all pair differently with certain tasks or assignments, depending on the learning goals and desired outcomes for the assignment. While each have their advantages and disadvantages, they all have an appropriate place in a teacher’s assessment toolbox.

Analytic Rubric

Analytic rubrics focus on breaking down the work into specific components or criteria and then evaluating each of those components separately. Each individual component is usually scored on a separate scale, allowing for more detailed feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the performance. Analytic rubrics are useful when there is a specific focus on particular skills or knowledge students are expected to demonstrate. Analytic rubrics are very specific and detailed, and for that reason, they can sometimes be seen as more complicated or complex to use. 

Analytic rubrics are sometimes viewed as the most reliable assessment rubric because they tend to be more precise assessments and offer more specific and detailed feedback to students. Because of this, these rubrics are often better able to align with learning objects, which can promote deeper learning. Teachers who are using more targeted instruction will benefit from using a more targeted assessment. 

Below, Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy offers a playful example of rubrics assessing breakfast in bed:

Holistic Rubric

Holistic rubrics provide a broader overall assessment of the quality of student work. They typically use a single scale to evaluate the work, ranging simply from one to five or from excellent to poor. Holistic rubrics are useful when the focus is on the overall quality of the work rather than on smaller, more specific components of the work.

Holistic rubrics can be used at any point in any subject when there is a task or assignment being assessed as a whole. For example, art classes often use a holistic grading rubric to assess broad categories such as creativity or composition. Whereas an English class may use a more analytical rubric for writing, a history class may use a holistic rubric when grading an essay for the overall success of argumentation, evidence, and organization. Holistic rubrics are often used with projects in many classes to evaluate the quality of the project on an overall scale from weak to exemplary. 

Developmental Rubric

Finally, developmental rubrics are used to assess a student’s progress or development over time. They are typically used in subjects like writing or language development, where progress is more gradual. Developmental rubrics are great for courses or assessments that require multiple assessments over a longer period of time. Within a developmental rubric, there are multiple levels of performance that show progress made from one level to the next over time. 

Because developmental rubrics are focused on growth and development, they are often best used in courses to judge progress that has been made over a length of the course. For example, English classes may assess someone’s writing growth with a developmental rubric that ranges from weak to exemplary. Math classes may assess progress on categories such as problem-solving or mathematical reasoning with a rubric including emerging, developing, and proficient levels. Likewise, art classes may track progressions of creativity and technique with descriptors like beginner, intermediate, or advanced. As a student’s knowledge and skills develop over time, teachers will see a progression in learning and mastery of those concepts.

How to Design a Rubric

While each type of rubric may have its own step in how to design it, the overall process of designing a rubric should follow a standard pattern of steps. Writing a strong rubric takes time and attention to detail, but the outcome produces a more effective rubric that will offer more benefits to students and the teacher. 

Plan your purpose and pick a rubric style . First, teachers must decide what they want to teach, what they want to assess, and then how they are going to assess it. Teachers must think all the way to the end even at the very beginning. This may determine what type of rubric will be designed.

Align the rubric with the task or assignment . Once a certain rubric has been chosen, teachers must identify the learning objectives of the assessment and determine the skills and knowledge the students need to demonstrate. If a teacher does not properly align the assessment with the assignment, then they are seemingly setting students up for failure. 

Write clear and concise criteria and levels of performance . Long and wordy does not always mean detailed or superior. Sometimes the lengthy and complex rubrics may seem detailed, but instead overwhelm or confuse students. Teachers must develop the criteria and descriptors for each criterion, but doing so in a clear and concise way will help students better understand what is expected of them. 

Provide specific and actionable feedback to students . Remember that rubrics and assessments are ultimately meant to be used as a tool for supporting student learning and growth. Therefore, rubrics should be used as a stepping stone, not an end point. Students should be able to do something with the feedback that has been presented to them on a rubric.

Reflect on what worked and be willing to revise . The first rubric designed for an assessment may not always be the final rubric used. Sometimes rubrics need edits or changes along the way, and it is better for the teacher to accept responsibility for those adjustments rather than risk inaccurately assessing students based on a poorly constructed rubric.

Online resources for rubrics are very common and range from simple rubric examples , to common core-aligned rubrics , to college university recommended rubrics. For example, NC State University offers best rubric practices and examples, including this example of a holistic rubric for a final paper:

Within the last few years, the College Board switched its AP English Language and Composition rubric from a holistic grading scale of zero to nine to using an analytic rubric, which evaluates student performance based on three main scoring categories.

Using Rubrics for Assessment

To use rubrics to facilitate fair, efficient, and effective assessment of student work, there are several things to consider when implementing the rubrics. These include the purpose of the rubric, the placement within the lesson plan, and the people using the rubric.

First, one must consider what the intended purpose of the rubric is within the assessment. For example, rubrics can be used in different types of assessments, such as formative or summative. Both types of assessments are valuable for different reasons, and therefore rubrics should be used in both scenarios. 

Another thing to consider when using rubrics is the placement of the rubric within the lesson plan. Providing the rubric at the beginning of a task or assessment can allow students to clearly see the requirements and expectations. Using a rubric in the middle of an assignment can provide more specific and actionable feedback for students before completing a project. Then, of course, using the rubric at the end of a lesson plan is where final and more formal assessment and reflection can take place.

Finally, teachers are not the only ones who can fill out and “assess” using a rubric. Allowing students to use rubrics for self-assessment and peer assessment teaches them vital skills of how to self-evaluate their work as well as how to offer constructive criticism and compliments to others.

It is important that once a rubric has been used for assessment, the data generated be evaluated, processed, and used for future assignments. Because rubrics allow teachers to assess with fairness and objectivity, the results of rubrics offer teachers and students valuable feedback for teaching and learning. 

Best Practices for Creating Effective Rubrics

Whether you are providing detailed feedback to a student on their essay, observing that a student needs improvement on a certain math skill, or assessing the overall quality of someone’s artwork, rubrics used effectively lead to less teacher stress and more student success. Creating clear, reliable, and valid rubrics might seem like a massive undertaking, but with a few simple steps and a few key strategies, rubrics can revolutionize a classroom .

Use clear and concise language . Students often struggle with heavy academic language, so providing clear instructions and understandable language can help students go into a task or assignment knowing exactly what is expected of them. This includes writing clear and concise criteria and levels of performance.

Know when to use what . Use different types of rubrics for different tasks or assignments. A teacher who uses a variety of assessments is a teacher who understands different students learn in different ways. Rubrics are not “one size fits all,” so know when to use different resources. The rubric must align with the task or assignment to be effective for both teachers and students.

Provide actionable feedback . A painful moment for a teacher is when a student looks at the number or letter at the top of a grade sheet, ignores the heartfelt feedback written on the page, and immediately tosses it into the trash can. Teachers can avoid this scenario by providing specific action steps for students to take once they have received their feedback.

Some of the common misconceptions when it comes to creating and using effective rubrics are that 1) any rubric will work for anything and that 2) rubrics are too hard to make. These two misconceptions lead people to the common mistake of taking to the Internet and downloading a rubric that looks like a good fit.

It is important to avoid these when creating rubrics because the reality is that not all rubrics will work for all assignments, but it is also not impossible to quickly and effectively create a rubric that is perfect for your specific needs. If using a rubric from another source, you must ensure the reliability and validity of the rubric. One might be better off creating a simple holistic rubric than using a detailed analytic rubric that needs a lot of checking or editing to fit your assignment. 

Conclusion: The Importance of Rubrics in Education

Rubrics are an important assessment tool for evaluating student learning and provide a consistent, fair, and clear way to assess student work. While there are a number of different rubric resources available online, rubrics are also fairly easy for educators to create and personalize to their specific needs. Creating rubrics is an ongoing process, which means it is important to continually review and revise rubrics to ensure they are still meeting the needs of the students. Just as students need to make adjustments in their learning, teachers may also need to make adjustments from time to time in their assessments.

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Creating Grading Rubrics for Writing Assignments

Pamela Flash

Establishing and discussing specific characteristics of success when an assignment is first distributed benefits both students and instructors. Creating grading rubrics, or grids, is a typical way to do this. Having received the criteria with an assignment, students are able to write toward specific goals. Later, when they look at their grades, they can see at a glance the strengths and weaknesses of their work. Instructors are able to grade according to customized descriptive criteria that reflect the intention of a specific assignment and won't change according to the hour of night or the amount of effort a particular student is suspected of expending. Rubrics can also save on grading time, as they allow instructors to detail comments on one or two elements and simply indicate ratings on others. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in courses that involve more than one instructor, as in team-taught or multi-sectioned courses, because they ensure that all instructors are measuring work by the same standards.

Step One: Identifying Criteria

The first step involved in creating assignment-specific rubrics is revisiting an assignment's intended outcomes. These objectives can be considered, prioritized, and reworded to create a rubric's criteria. If, for example, an instructor assigns a literature review hoping that students might become skilled at reducing complex texts down to pithy summaries, "concise summary" can be one of the grading criteria included in the rubric. Care must be taken to keep the list of criteria from becoming unwieldy; ten ranked items is usually the upper limit. In addition, to be usefully translated and used by students, criteria should be specific and descriptive. Criteria like "clear," "organized," and "interesting" don't mean much to students when they sit down to revise.

Step Two: Weighing Criteria

When criteria have been identified, decisions are made about their varying importance. Say, for example, that an essay is assigned by a geography professor who intends for students to become skilled at creating concrete and accurate observation-based descriptions, practiced in analyzing their data and in devising a land-use proposal, and able to create correctly-formatted, error-free prose. When creating a grading rubric for that assignment, the instructor will need to decide on the relative weight of each criterion. Is the error-free prose objective equal to the analysis objective?

Step Three: Describing Levels of Success

When the criteria have been set, decisions must be made about an assessment scale. Many instructors like to limit this section of the rubric to a three-point scale ("weak," "satisfactory," "strong"). Others may prefer to break this down into five or six levels, adding categories like "needs extensive revision," or "outstanding."

Step Four: Creating and Distributing the Grid

When the specific criteria and levels of success have been named and ranked, they can be sorted into a table (see samples below) and distributed with the assignment. Note that spaces are created for comments on each item and again at the end.

1=not present   2=needs extensive revision   3=satisfactory   4=strong   5=outstanding

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Teaching excellence & educational innovation, grading and performance rubrics, what are rubrics.

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric divides the assigned work into component parts and provides clear descriptions of the characteristics of the work associated with each component, at varying levels of mastery. Rubrics can be used for a wide array of assignments: papers, projects, oral presentations, artistic performances, group projects, etc. Rubrics can be used as scoring or grading guides, to provide formative feedback to support and guide ongoing learning efforts, or both.

Advantages of Using Rubrics

Using a rubric provides several advantages to both instructors and students. Grading according to an explicit and descriptive set of criteria that is designed to reflect the weighted importance of the objectives of the assignment helps ensure that the instructor’s grading standards don’t change over time. Grading consistency is difficult to maintain over time because of fatigue, shifting standards based on prior experience, or intrusion of other criteria. Furthermore, rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty and by allowing instructors to refer to the rubric description associated with a score rather than having to write long comments. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in large courses that have multiple graders (other instructors, teaching assistants, etc.) because they can help ensure consistency across graders and reduce the systematic bias that can be introduced between graders.

Used more formatively, rubrics can help instructors get a clearer picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their class. By recording the component scores and tallying up the number of students scoring below an acceptable level on each component, instructors can identify those skills or concepts that need more instructional time and student effort.

Grading rubrics are also valuable to students. A rubric can help instructors communicate to students the specific requirements and acceptable performance standards of an assignment. When rubrics are given to students with the assignment description, they can help students monitor and assess their progress as they work toward clearly indicated goals. When assignments are scored and returned with the rubric, students can more easily recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their work and direct their efforts accordingly.

Examples of Rubrics

Here are links to a diverse set of rubrics designed by Carnegie Mellon faculty and faculty at other institutions. Although your particular field of study and type of assessment activity may not be represented currently, viewing a rubric that is designed for a similar activity may provide you with ideas on how to divide your task into components and how to describe the varying levels of mastery.

Paper Assignments

• Example 1: Philosophy Paper This rubric was designed for student papers in a range of philosophy courses, CMU.
• Example 2: Psychology Assignment Short, concept application homework assignment in cognitive psychology, CMU.
• Example 3: Anthropology Writing Assignments This rubric was designed for a series of short writing assignments in anthropology, CMU.
• Example 4: History Research Paper . This rubric was designed for essays and research papers in history, CMU.
• Example 1: Capstone Project in Design This rubric describes the components and standard of performance from the research phase to the final presentation for a senior capstone project in the School of Design, CMU.
• Example 2: Engineering Design Project This rubric describes performance standards on three aspects of a team project: Research and Design, Communication, and Team Work.

Oral Presentations

• Example 1: Oral Exam This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing performance on an oral exam in an upper-division history course, CMU.
• Example 2: Oral Communication
• Example 3: Group Presentations This rubric describes a set of components and standards for assessing group presentations in a history course, CMU.

Class Participation/Contributions

• Example 1: Discussion Class This rubric assesses the quality of student contributions to class discussions. This is appropriate for an undergraduate-level course, CMU.
• Example 2: Advanced Seminar This rubric is designed for assessing discussion performance in an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar. 

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Rubrics are a set of criteria to evaluate performance on an assignment or assessment. Rubrics can communicate expectations regarding the quality of work to students and provide a standardized framework for instructors to assess work. Rubrics can be used for both formative and summative assessment. They are also crucial in encouraging self-assessment of work and structuring peer-assessments. 

Why use rubrics?

Rubrics are an important tool to assess learning in an equitable and just manner. This is because they enable:

• A common set of standards and criteria to be uniformly applied, which can mitigate bias
• Transparency regarding the standards and criteria on which students are evaluated
• Efficient grading with timely and actionable feedback 
• Identifying areas in which students need additional support and guidance 
• The use of objective, criterion-referenced metrics for evaluation 

Some instructors may be reluctant to provide a rubric to grade assessments under the perception that it stifles student creativity (Haugnes & Russell, 2018). However, sharing the purpose of an assessment and criteria for success in the form of a rubric along with relevant examples has been shown to particularly improve the success of BIPOC, multiracial, and first-generation students (Jonsson, 2014; Winkelmes, 2016). Improved success in assessments is generally associated with an increased sense of belonging which, in turn, leads to higher student retention and more equitable outcomes in the classroom (Calkins & Winkelmes, 2018; Weisz et al., 2023). By not providing a rubric, faculty may risk having students guess the criteria on which they will be evaluated. When students have to guess what expectations are, it may unfairly disadvantage students who are first-generation, BIPOC, international, or otherwise have not been exposed to the cultural norms that have dominated higher-ed institutions in the U.S (Shapiro et al., 2023). Moreover, in such cases, criteria may be applied inconsistently for students leading to biases in grades awarded to students.

Steps for Creating a Rubric

Clearly state the purpose of the assessment, which topic(s) learners are being tested on, the type of assessment (e.g., a presentation, essay, group project), the skills they are being tested on (e.g., writing, comprehension, presentation, collaboration), and the goal of the assessment for instructors (e.g., gauging formative or summative understanding of the topic). 

Determine the specific criteria or dimensions to assess in the assessment. These criteria should align with the learning objectives or outcomes to be evaluated. These criteria typically form the rows in a rubric grid and describe the skills, knowledge, or behavior to be demonstrated. The set of criteria may include, for example, the idea/content, quality of arguments, organization, grammar, citations and/or creativity in writing. These criteria may form separate rows or be compiled in a single row depending on the type of rubric.

(See row headers  of  Figure 1 )

Create a scale of performance levels that describe the degree of proficiency attained for each criterion. The scale typically has 4 to 5 levels (although there may be fewer levels depending on the type of rubrics used). The rubrics should also have meaningful labels (e.g., not meeting expectations, approaching expectations, meeting expectations, exceeding expectations). When assigning levels of performance, use inclusive language that can inculcate a growth mindset among students, especially when work may be otherwise deemed to not meet the mark. Some examples include, “Does not yet meet expectations,” “Considerable room for improvement,” “ Progressing,” “Approaching,” “Emerging,” “Needs more work,” instead of using terms like “Unacceptable,” “Fails,” “Poor,” or “Below Average.”

(See column headers  of  Figure 1 )

Develop a clear and concise descriptor for each combination of criterion and performance level. These descriptors should provide examples or explanations of what constitutes each level of performance for each criterion. Typically, instructors should start by describing the highest and lowest level of performance for that criterion and then describing intermediate performance for that criterion. It is important to keep the language uniform across all columns, e.g., use syntax and words that are aligned in each column for a given criteria. 

(See cells  of  Figure 1 )

It is important to consider how each criterion is weighted and for each criterion to reflect the importance of learning objectives being tested. For example, if the primary goal of a research proposal is to test mastery of content and application of knowledge, these criteria should be weighted more heavily compared to other criteria (e.g., grammar, style of presentation). This can be done by associating a different scoring system for each criteria (e.g., Following a scale of 8-6-4-2 points for each level of performance in higher weight criteria and 4-3-2-1 points for each level of performance for lower weight criteria). Further, the number of points awarded across levels of performance should be evenly spaced (e.g., 10-8-6-4 instead of 10-6-3-1). Finally, if there is a letter grade associated with a particular assessment, consider how it relates to scores. For example, instead of having students receive an A only if they received the highest level of performance on each criterion, consider assigning an A grade to a range of scores (28 - 30 total points) or a combination of levels of performance (e.g., exceeds expectations on higher weight criteria and meets expectations on other criteria). 

(See the numerical values in the column headers  of  Figure 1 )

Figure 1:  Graphic describing the five basic elements of a rubric

Note : Consider using a template rubric that can be used to evaluate similar activities in the classroom to avoid the fatigue of developing multiple rubrics. Some tools include Rubistar or iRubric which provide suggested words for each criteria depending on the type of assessment. Additionally, the above format can be incorporated in rubrics that can be directly added in Canvas or in the grid view of rubrics in gradescope which are common grading tools. Alternately, tables within a Word processor or Spreadsheet may also be used to build a rubric. You may also adapt the example rubrics provided below to the specific learning goals for the assessment using the blank template rubrics we have provided against each type of rubric. Watch the linked video for a quick introduction to designing a rubric . Word document (docx) files linked below will automatically download to your device whereas pdf files will open in a new tab.

Types of Rubrics

In these rubrics, one specifies at least two criteria and provides a separate score for each criterion. The steps outlined above for creating a rubric are typical for an analytic style rubric. Analytic rubrics are used to provide detailed feedback to students and help identify strengths as well as particular areas in need of improvement. These can be particularly useful when providing formative feedback to students, for student peer assessment and self-assessments, or for project-based summative assessments that evaluate student learning across multiple criteria. You may use a blank analytic rubric template (docx) or adapt an existing sample of an analytic rubric (pdf) . 

Fig 2: Graphic describing a sample analytic rubric (adopted from George Mason University, 2013)

These are a subset of analytical rubrics that are typically used to assess student performance and engagement during a learning period but not the end product. Such rubrics are typically used to assess soft skills and behaviors that are less tangible (e.g., intercultural maturity, empathy, collaboration skills). These rubrics are useful in assessing the extent to which students develop a particular skill, ability, or value in experiential learning based programs or skills. They are grounded in the theory of development (King, 2005). Examples include an intercultural knowledge and competence rubric (docx)  and a global learning rubric (docx) .

These rubrics consider all criteria evaluated on one scale, providing a single score that gives an overall impression of a student’s performance on an assessment.These rubrics also emphasize the overall quality of a student’s work, rather than delineating shortfalls of their work. However, a limitation of the holistic rubrics is that they are not useful for providing specific, nuanced feedback or to identify areas of improvement. Thus, they might be useful when grading summative assessments in which students have previously received detailed feedback using analytic or single-point rubrics. They may also be used to provide quick formative feedback for smaller assignments where not more than 2-3 criteria are being tested at once. Try using our blank holistic rubric template docx)  or adapt an existing sample of holistic rubric (pdf) . 

Fig 3: Graphic describing a sample holistic rubric (adopted from Teaching Commons, DePaul University)

These rubrics contain only two levels of performance (e.g., yes/no, present/absent) across a longer list of criteria (beyond 5 levels). Checklist rubrics have the advantage of providing a quick assessment of criteria given the binary assessment of criteria that are either met or are not met. Consequently, they are preferable when initiating self- or  peer-assessments of learning given that it simplifies evaluations to be more objective and criteria can elicit only one of two responses allowing uniform and quick grading. For similar reasons, such rubrics are useful for faculty in providing quick formative feedback since it immediately highlights the specific criteria to improve on. Such rubrics are also used in grading summative assessments in courses utilizing alternative grading systems such as specifications grading, contract grading or a credit/no credit grading system wherein a minimum threshold of performance has to be met for the assessment. Having said that, developing rubrics from existing analytical rubrics may require considerable investment upfront given that criteria have to be phrased in a way that can only elicit binary responses. Here is a link to the checklist rubric template (docx) .

Fig. 4: Graphic describing a sample checklist rubric

A single point rubric is a modified version of a checklist style rubric, in that it specifies a single column of criteria. However, rather than only indicating whether expectations are met or not, as happens in a checklist rubric, a single point rubric allows instructors to specify ways in which criteria exceeds or does not meet expectations. Here the criteria to be tested are laid out in a central column describing the average expectation for the assignment. Instructors indicate areas of improvement on the left side of the criteria, whereas areas of strength in student performance are indicated on the right side. These types of rubrics provide flexibility in scoring, and are typically used in courses with alternative grading systems such as ungrading or contract grading. However, they do require the instructors to provide detailed feedback for each student, which can be unfeasible for assessments in large classes. Here is a link to the single point rubric template (docx) .

Fig. 5 Graphic describing a single point rubric (adopted from Teaching Commons, DePaul University)

Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Rubrics

When designing the rubric format, descriptors and criteria should be presented in a way that is compatible with screen readers and reading assistive technology. For example, avoid using only color, jargon, or complex terminology to convey information. In case you do use color, pictures or graphics, try providing alternative formats for rubrics, such as plain text documents. Explore resources from the CU Digital Accessibility Office to learn more.

Co-creating rubrics can help students to engage in higher-order thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation. Further, it allows students to take ownership of their own learning by determining the criteria of their work they aspire towards. For graduate classes or upper-level students, one way of doing this may be to provide learning outcomes of the project, and let students develop the rubric on their own. However, students in introductory classes may need more scaffolding by providing them a draft and leaving room for modification (Stevens & Levi 2013). Watch the linked video for tips on co-creating rubrics with students . Further, involving teaching assistants in designing a rubric can help in getting feedback on expectations for an assessment prior to implementing and norming a rubric. 

When first designing a rubric, it is important to compare grades awarded for the same assessment by multiple graders to make sure the criteria are applied uniformly and reliably for the same level of performance. Further, ensure that the levels of performance in student work can be adequately distinguished using a rubric. Such a norming protocol is particularly important to also do at the start of any course in which multiple graders use the same rubric to grade an assessment (e.g., recitation sections, lab sections, teaching team). Here, instructors may select a subset of assignments that all graders evaluate using the same rubric, followed by a discussion to identify any discrepancies in criteria applied and ways to address them. Such strategies can make the rubrics more reliable, effective, and clear.

Sharing the rubric with students prior to an assessment can help familiarize students with an instructor’s expectations. This can help students master their learning outcomes by guiding their work in the appropriate direction and increase student motivation. Further, providing the rubric to students can help encourage metacognition and ability to self-assess learning.

Sample Rubrics

Below are links to rubric templates designed by a team of experts assembled by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to assess 16 major learning goals. These goals are a part of the Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) program. All of these examples are analytic rubrics and have detailed criteria to test specific skills. However, since any given assessment typically tests multiple skills, instructors are encouraged to develop their own rubric by utilizing criteria picked from a combination of the rubrics linked below.

• Civic knowledge and engagement-local and global
• Creative thinking
• Critical thinking
• Ethical reasoning
• Foundations and skills for lifelong learning
• Information literacy
• Integrative and applied learning
• Intercultural knowledge and competence
• Inquiry and analysis
• Oral communication
• Problem solving
• Quantitative literacy
• Written Communication

Note : Clicking on the above links will automatically download them to your device in Microsoft Word format. These links have been created and are hosted by Kansas State University . Additional information regarding the VALUE Rubrics may be found on the AAC&U homepage . 

Below are links to sample rubrics that have been developed for different types of assessments. These rubrics follow the analytical rubric template, unless mentioned otherwise. However, these rubrics can be modified into other types of rubrics (e.g., checklist, holistic or single point rubrics) based on the grading system and goal of assessment (e.g., formative or summative). As mentioned previously, these rubrics can be modified using the blank template provided.

• Oral presentations  
• Painting Portfolio (single-point rubric)
• Research Paper
• Video Storyboard

Additional information:

Office of Assessment and Curriculum Support. (n.d.). Creating and using rubrics . University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

Calkins, C., & Winkelmes, M. A. (2018). A teaching method that boosts UNLV student retention . UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo , 3.

Fraile, J., Panadero, E., & Pardo, R. (2017). Co-creating rubrics: The effects on self-regulated learning, self-efficacy and performance of establishing assessment criteria with students. Studies In Educational Evaluation , 53, 69-76

Haugnes, N., & Russell, J. L. (2016). Don’t box me in: Rubrics for àrtists and Designers . To Improve the Academy , 35 (2), 249–283. 

Jonsson, A. (2014). Rubrics as a way of providing transparency in assessment , Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 39(7), 840-852 

McCartin, L. (2022, February 1). Rubrics! an equity-minded practice . University of Northern Colorado

Shapiro, S., Farrelly, R., & Tomaš, Z. (2023). Chapter 4: Effective and Equitable Assignments and Assessments. Fostering International Student Success in higher education (pp, 61-87, second edition). TESOL Press.

Stevens, D. D., & Levi, A. J. (2013). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning (second edition). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Teaching Commons (n.d.). Types of Rubrics . DePaul University

Teaching Resources (n.d.). Rubric best practices, examples, and templates . NC State University 

Winkelmes, M., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Weavil, K.H. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students’ success . Peer Review , 8(1/2), 31-36.

Weisz, C., Richard, D., Oleson, K., Winkelmes, M.A., Powley, C., Sadik, A., & Stone, B. (in progress, 2023). Transparency, confidence, belonging and skill development among 400 community college students in the state of Washington . 

Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2009). Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) . 

Canvas Community. (2021, August 24). How do I add a rubric in a course? Canvas LMS Community.

 Center for Teaching & Learning. (2021, March 03). Overview of Rubrics . University of Colorado, Boulder

 Center for Teaching & Learning. (2021, March 18). Best practices to co-create rubrics with students . University of Colorado, Boulder.

Chase, D., Ferguson, J. L., & Hoey, J. J. (2014). Assessment in creative disciplines: Quantifying and qualifying the aesthetic . Common Ground Publishing.

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform schools and classrooms . Corwin Press, CA.

Gradescope (n.d.). Instructor: Assignment - Grade Submissions . Gradescope Help Center. 

Henning, G., Baker, G., Jankowski, N., Lundquist, A., & Montenegro, E. (Eds.). (2022). Reframing assessment to center equity . Stylus Publishing. 

 King, P. M. & Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2005). A developmental model of intercultural maturity . Journal of College Student Development . 46(2), 571-592.

Selke, M. J. G. (2013). Rubric assessment goes to college: Objective, comprehensive evaluation of student work. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

The Institute for Habits of Mind. (2023, January 9). Creativity Rubrics - The Institute for Habits of Mind . 

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9 Elements of a Writing Rubric: How to Score Well on Your Paper

Writing a paper in college can feel daunting, but luckily, many writing assignments come with a rubric—clear descriptions of what your professor believes demonstrates competent writing and proficiency in research, structure, and mechanics.

Writing rubrics are a helpful tool to keep your writing aligned with the assignment and to understand exactly what your professor is looking for so you can score well on your paper.

Turn in your paper with confidence Grammarly gives your writing extra polish Write with Grammarly

What is a writing rubric?

A writing rubric is a clear set of guidelines on what your paper should include, often written as a rating scale that shows the range of scores possible on the assignment and how to earn each one. Professors use writing rubrics to grade the essays they assign, typically scoring on content, organization, mechanics, and overall understanding.

Writing rubrics exist to help you understand the assignment fully and show how you can reach the score you desire. A rubric is often illustrated in a table that includes:

• Row headings that articulate the requirements
• Column headings that show the different scores possible
• Boxes inside the rubric that show how each requirement can be achieved under each level of proficiency

How do writing rubrics work in college?

Writing rubrics take the mystery out of what your professor is looking for in a well-written essay. While rubrics are used at all levels, college-level writing rubrics are often very detailed about expectations, and scoring is done according to how the student covers the topic and employs writing skills in an organized, effective way.

When a professor assigns a paper, it often comes with a writing rubric. The professor will use the writing rubric to grade your essay. Writing rubrics offer guidance and help you make sure you’re ticking every box as you write. They don’t always involve points. Sometimes, rubrics score papers on a scale from poor to excellent. Occasionally a rubric will specify which elements of a topic must be covered in a paper in a checklist structure with space for feedback, rather than a scoring system.

9 elements of a writing rubric

Staying focused in your writing is important. You want to make sure that your ideas and supporting evidence are clear throughout.

• What is the main purpose of your paper?
• Is it relevant to the assignment?
• Do you stay consistent or tend to go off on tangents to the subject?

2 Thesis statement

A thesis statement is a declarative sentence that tells the reader the argument being made or the main point of the paper.

• Is your thesis statement strong, clear, and insightful?
• Is your thesis statement relevant to the assignment?

3 Support and development

The support and development section in a writing rubric assesses how well you support your thesis with research.

• How in-depth is the analysis?
• Is it relevant?
• Do you make a strong case for your thesis using a wide range of evidence from credible primary and secondary sources?

4 Audience and tone

In a writing rubric, the audience and tone sections refer to how well your writing style aligns with the purpose of the paper and who it is intended for.

• Is the tone appropriate for the audience (e.g., other students, professors, or outside institutions)?
• Is the tone consistent, or is it formal at times and informal at others?
• Is the tone engaging and in sync with your unique writing style?

5 Structure

Structure refers to how you organize and build on each of your ideas from the beginning to the end of your paper.

• Is the paper’s structure logical?
• Is there flow between sentences and paragraphs?
• Is there a strong introduction, supporting body, and clear conclusion ?

6 Point of view

With your audience and the purpose of your essay in mind, you need to pick an appropriate point of view .

• Is the point of view appropriate? For example, the first-person point of view is often considered inappropriate for an academic paper.
• Is the point of view consistent?
• Does the point of view add to the paper’s impact and tone?

7 Sentence structure

You’ll want to avoid things like run-on sentences , filler words , and clunky transitions between paragraphs.

• Is there varied sentence structure throughout?
• Are the sentences grammatically correct?
• Are the transitions between sentences and paragraphs clean and easy to follow?

8 Mechanics

Good mechanics in a paper rely on following all of the rules in writing.

• Is your writing free of grammatical , spelling , and punctuation errors?
• Do you demonstrate a strong understanding of proper English mechanics, such as capitalization, contractions, gerunds, participles, numbers, and punctuation marks?

9 Vocabulary

In a writing rubric, a professor uses the vocabulary section to assess your word choice and how precisely you apply your vocabulary.

• Are you using words that fit the subject, or are they too basic or too complex?
• Is the word choice varied, precise, and collegiate-level?

Tip: For papers focused on academics, theory, or persuasion, a writing rubric will emphasize the need for a strong thesis statement, relevant supporting evidence, critical analysis, and clarity. For creative writing, rubrics will emphasize the importance of originality, voice, and audience appeal.

Levels of proficiency in a writing rubric

Point-based rubrics will show the total number of points you can score based on proficiency in each criterion. By ensuring your work matches the criteria in the highest categories, you should earn a good grade.

Levels of performance, given as labels, typically range from highly proficient to unproficient. Each level shows how well you did in each category based on words and phrases such as:

• Exemplary, advanced
• Proficient, good
• Emerging, needs improvement
• Unsatisfactory, poor

How to use a writing rubric to improve your paper

Before submitting your paper, you can use the rubric as a checklist to ensure you followed the assignment properly. Editing your paper with reference to the rubric is a great way to check for grammatical errors and polish your writing to be engaging, organized, and well developed.

Graded rubrics are also a great map for the revision process and can show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie in writing. Studying rubrics can even make you a stronger writer. By considering the qualities that make up a strong essay, you can work to master the different areas and continually improve your writing.

Essay rubric example

Writing rubric FAQs

A writing rubric is a scoring tool that professors use to communicate their expectations for a writing assignment and the degrees of proficiency each student can reach. Writing rubrics can help students understand how their work is graded.

How does a writing rubric work?

A writing rubric shows each of the grades you can receive based on how well you adhere to the criteria listed under each level of proficiency. It can be a helpful checklist when writing.

What are the key elements of a writing rubric?

Key elements assessed in a writing rubric include focus, thesis, organization and structure, development of ideas, support of the thesis statement, audience, tone, point of view, vocabulary, and writing mechanics.

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