Reflection: The importance of using a rubric

Here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote analyzing the importance of using a rubric for evaluations.

I created evaluation rubrics for my colleagues, teachers, and competitions to speed up evaluations and make sure everyone is evaluated on the same criteria every time. I require my colleagues and competition organizers to share the evaluation rubrics with students/competitors so they know what to expect and reduce anxiety.

When I began working at my previous school, the written part of the final exams were supposed to have half a point taken off for minor mistakes (punctuation, spelling, etc.) and a full point taken off for all other mistakes (grammar, style, etc.); for every single error, even if the student was consistent with the error (writing 'squirell' sixteen times would result in -8 on a 20 point assignment). The longer a student wrote, i.e. a high performing student pushing the limits of what they can do, the more likely they would fail because there were more opportunities for errors. It didn't seem fair to me that a student who tries hard should get a lower score than a student who does the minimum. There were also grammar questions in other parts of the exam, so students were being graded twice on the grammar: once in the Grammar section and once again in the Writing section. If a student doesn't understand a concept, there's no just reason to penalize them twice. Correcting all the exams also took nearly an entire week because every word, punctuation, and line of the writing had to be evaluated. I created a rubric that focused on clarity of writing (did the student communicate intelligibly) and sped up corrections. Students exam results began matching classwork and corrections dropped from a week to a day for the teacher.

In competitions, I frequently just saw scores given to students with no justification. There was even a debate competition where the winners did not answer the question. When I talked to the organizer about this, he told me that's the score the judges gave. I discovered upon talking with the judges that they used different scoring criteria from each other and for each group. When I organized our first competition, I created a scoring rubric for all the judges to use and went over each of the criteria with the judges. There were no complaints from anyone about the scores issued and everything was documented if there were any challenges or if a participant wanted specific advice on how to improve. The local university began using rubrics for their competitions after that (and I rallied the judges to slash the 20 page scoring rubric down to 1 page).

When evaluation rubrics are shared with students/participants, they know exactly what is expected of them. This reduces anxiety by reducing the unknown, thus letting students/participants focus on doing quality work. They can also go talk to the evaluator to learn their glows and grows so they can improve. If a parent comes in angry and ready to fight, it can be explained that every student was given the rubric, knew exactly what was expected, had time and was invited to ask questions about the rubric, and justifications for the scores that were written on the rubric; that deflates parental anger and soothes problems quite quickly if done in a calm voice.

A potential pitfall of not sharing rubrics with students is exemplified by one of my high school teachers. He would give us our assignments that told us what we were supposed to do. We would do the assignment and turn it in and get a C if we did everything we were told. To get higher than a C, we had to guess what additional work he wanted. If you did additional work but it's not what he wanted, you got a C. He didn't even tell us this until we got the results of the first assignment and complained about our grades. I also noticed that it was mostly girls who got higher grades when they did additional and when questioned he would say we didn't do ____ or ____ which would have earned us a higher grade.