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How do I evaluate essays and projects consistently and fairly?
Evaluating student learning is straightforward for multiple choice or true–false quizzes and exams. However, evaluating essays, projects, presentations, and similar assignments, which requires your judgment, can be more difficult. Creating a rubric will enable you to evaluate such assignments fairly and consistently.

How To

What is a rubric? A rubric is a set of criteria used to grade an assignment. A rubric also includes the performance standards that merit a grade of "excellent", "good," "needs improvement," " unacceptable" —or whatever scale you use to distinguish quality of work Here is an example of a rubric from the Pearson Prentice Hall Professional Development site.

You can find examples of rubrics for math, science, history, and other disciplines at the Chicago Public Schools Rubric Bank.

Following are guidelines for developing a rubric "table."

Question Action
1. What criteria or essential elements must be present in the student's work to ensure that it is high in quality? Include these as rows in your rubric
2. How many levels of achievement do you wish to illustrate for students? Include these as columns in your rubric.
3. For each criterion or essential element of quality, what is a clear description of performance at each achievement level? Include descriptions in the appropriate cells of the rubric.
4. What are the consequences of performing at each level of quality?

Add descriptions of consequences to the commentaries in the rubric.

 
5. What rating scheme will you use in the rubric? Add this to the rubric in a way that fits in with your grading philosophy.
6. When you use the rubric, what aspects work well and what aspects need improvement? Revise the rubric accordingly.

Adapted from "Figure6-6: Developing Useful Rubrics: Questions to Ask and Actions to Implement". In Huba, Mary E. and Freed, Jann E. Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses. Allyn and Bacon, 2000. ISBN 0205287387

Communicating to students the criteria by which you will evaluate their work provides them with the guidance they need to excel. A well-written rubric also serves as a foundation for your feedback on assignments— you can structure your comments with reference to the criteria you have developed.

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Resources

Huba, Mary E. and Freed, Jann E. Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses. Allyn and Bacon, 2000. ISBN 0205287387

Chicago Public Schools Rubric Bank
http://intranet.cps.k12.il.us/Assessments/Ideas_and_Rubrics/Rubric_Bank/rubric_bank.html

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html

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