Assessment rubrics

The University’s Assessment and Feedback Principles and Priorities explain that assessments must be accompanied by an assessment rubric or detailed grade descriptors.

The use of assessment rubrics supports the overarching principle that assessment and feedback will be reliable, robust and transparent by achieving the following:

• Students have a clearer understanding of how their assessed work will be judged and the expectations for different grade bands (often described as ‘seeing into the minds of markers’);
• Markers and students have a shared understanding of the criteria by which the work will be judged;
• Supports greater consistency, reliability and fairness in how marks are awarded;
• Ensures greater consistency in marking between multiple markers;
• Contributes to the efficiency of marking; descriptors used in a rubric can form the basis of feedback comments;
• Facilitates the provision of feedback, in that there can be a clearer relationship between the mark and the feedback provided.

What is an assessment rubric?

“A commonly used definition [of a rubric] is a document that articulates the expectations for an assignment by listing the criteria or what counts, and describing levels of quality from excellent to poor.” (Reddy and Andrade, 2010, p.435). They should be designed with reference to the University’s Common Marking Schemes.

Here is a simple example of an assessment rubric:

Why bother considering assessment rubrics?

The University’s Assessment and Feedback Priorities and Principles emphasise supporting students’ feedback literacy and the importance of students and staff engaging in conversations that develop a shared understanding of marking criteria. The use of rubrics can be a good strategy for achieving these aims. The Priorities and Principles also remind us of the importance of assessment that is robust and reliable, rubrics can make a valuable contribution here. 

How can we implement rubrics?

The Learn VLE has useful tools to support assessment rubrics. Using these helps our students to find all of their assessment guidance more easily and to have a more consistent experience. Rubrics can be pre-populated into Learn and can be copied and shared. Training in the use of Learn is provided by Information Services.

Rubrics in Learn guidance (SharePoint, UoE log-in required)

The educational research evidence around using rubrics

After over 40 years of research into assessment and feedback in higher education, it is very clear that staff often differ in their understanding of what makes for good assessed work, even within the same subject area (Bloxham et al., 2016). This is particularly true in disciplines that have more subjective forms of work and in interdisciplinary learning. There is often an even bigger gap in understanding of assessment expectations between students and staff, despite many efforts to write clear and ‘transparent’ assessment guidance (Sadler, 2010). 

Why does this happen? One reason is that language is inherently ambiguous and needs to be interpreted in the context of the particular community within which it is used and in reference to particular tasks (McArthur and Northedge, 2009; Rommetveit, 1974). Students who have less experience of the norms and practices of particular academic communities are more likely to get the wrong end of the stick. Another challenge is that students understandably tend to read assessment guidance through the lens of their past experiences, which can lead to misinterpretations (McCune, 2004). 

Used well, there is evidence that rubrics can help us deal with some of these challenges. The use of rubrics can improve consistency between markers (Taylor et al., 2024). Good use of rubrics can also increase students’ confidence in their understanding of what is expected of them and reduce their anxiety about assessments (Taylor et al., 2024). Rubrics can be used in discussions with students and in self and peer assessment to enable better student understanding of assessment expectations. Used in this way, rubrics can contribute to deeper learning and the attainment of higher-level skills (Reddy and Andrade, 2010). 

Rubrics have been used across a wide range of subject areas in higher education and many different forms of assessment, including concept maps, portfolios and literature reviews (Reddy and Andrade, 2010). Rubrics can enhance students’ perception that assessment practices are fair (Reddy and Andrade, 2010).  Given that feedback is often the most powerful driver of learning (Hattie and Timperley, 2007) putting time into shaping that feedback with rubrics is very worthwhile.

How to design assessment rubrics

The first step in designing good rubric templates for a School is to be clear about the typical intended learning outcomes used by programmes across the School and to have a discussion among the rubric designers to ensure mutual understanding of these ILOs.  The rubrics are then designed so that they describe different levels of performance on these ILOs. Course Organisers can then consider the fit of these School rubrics to the learning outcomes covered in each of their assessments and edit them where necessary. If there is existing student work for a course, then a shared reading of some examples can help draw out what the marking team understand by excellent, good or poor work as expressed in the rubric. This is also a good time to identify common misconceptions held by students, which might be resolved by effective use of a rubric. Rubrics should include more than tick boxes or items to circle. There should be room for individualised written comments.

There are several different styles of assessment rubric to choose from:

Analytic rubrics often take the form of a table that describes different levels of performance against each criterion. This can help students understand their strengths and weaknesses more easily but can reduce inter-marker reliability, unless all of the levels of performance are clearly defined. Some analytic rubrics have points attached to different levels of performance on each criterion that can be totalled automatically using the rubrics function in Learn. In other cases, the marker makes a judgement about the overall mark to assign based on the student’s performance against the rubric. 

Single point rubrics only signal whether proficiency has been achieved on each criterion. These can help students move their focus away from grades to reading their feedback more carefully. A potential disadvantage is that markers may need to spend more time writing individualised feedback. An example of this would be a pass/not yet pass rubric that only indicates what level students need to reach on each criterion to pass. 

Holistic rubrics allow the marker to assign a single grade based on an overall judgement of the student’s work based on a single description of what performance looks like at different grades. This can be quicker for markers but can make it harder for students to understand exactly how they are performing well and where they need to improve their work. Holistic rubrics are not in common use within this University.

NC State University teaching resources: rubric best practice, examples and templates

Involving students in designing rubrics can be an excellent way to enable shared understanding of assessment expectations and to give students a strong sense that their voices are being heard (Kilgour et al., 2020).

How should we use assessment rubrics?

Rubrics are probably best thought of as tools to help coordinate thinking and understanding between staff, and between students and staff. For their use to be effective, they need to be built into compassionate and developmental ongoing conversations about what makes for high quality academic work in a given context (Taylor et al., 2024). These conversations are especially important when new or inexperienced students are tackling an unfamiliar assessment, or when new colleagues are joining marking teams. 

It helps if everyone involved in marking gets together to discuss what they understand by the elements of any new rubric. In the Business School, colleagues moderate new rubrics before they are released to students, this is a good way to ensure new rubrics will work well. Practice marking exercises that test markers’ shared understanding of rubrics before they feedback to students make it more likely that marking will be consistent and perceived as fair by students. It’s also important to let students know if different aspects of the rubric are weighted differently, as they might assume everything counts equally.

Students’ active involvement in the feedback process is important for developing their feedback literacy (Carless and Boud, 2018; Hoo, et al., 2022). Self and peer feedback practices can be a powerful way to enable students to develop the capabilities for evaluative judgement that they will need in their studies and their future working lives (Tai et al., 2018). Rubrics are important for self and peer assessment, as they can scaffold students’ understanding of assessment criteria to enable more effective judgement.

Where possible, co-creation of rubrics involving staff and students can be a positive experience that enhances mutual understanding of assessment criteria and helps academics to identify common student misconceptions (Kilgour et al., 2020). The processes of co-creation considered by Kilgour et al. included teachers and students designing rubrics by considering exemplars together, and discussing learning outcomes and any accreditation requirements. These processes helped the students feel that their concerns and inputs were valued. Rubrics for use in courses can be co-created with a small number of students before a course takes place, or with a whole class of students when the course is underway. The latter has the potential for a greater number of students to gain a clearer understanding about the requirements of their assessments.

Overall, the use of rubrics may be best thought of as part of the wider assessment and feedback cycle. Careful attention to achieving good conversations and mutually shared understanding at each step in the cycle is ideal (although challenging under current constraints!). This blog post by Su Goopy and Neneh Rowa-Dewar is a good example of considering the quality of the assessment and feedback cycle.

Teaching Matters blog post - turning the tables: Assessing the quality of our feedback to students

Limitations of rubrics

One possible limitation of rubrics is that they can give the impression that complete objectivity and transparency in marking and assessment criteria is possible. While these are often valuable ideals to strive for, they will rarely be fully realised (Bloxham et al., 2016; Rommetveit, 1974; Sadler, 2010). So, it’s important to manage students’ expectations and explain why marking is complex and often somewhat subjective, otherwise the use of rubrics may lead to increased student concern about fairness.

Another possible challenging in striving toward objectivity and transparency using rubrics is that this can lead to an over-emphasis on inter-rater reliability at the expense of the validity of learning for students’ future lives. It is easier to achieve high reliability by assessing topics and capabilities that have clear cut answers. While this is important in many subject areas, some of what we hope students will learn in higher education is not like this. The University’s Skills for Success Framework asks for students to develop capabilities like inclusivity, adaptivity and collaboration. These capabilities have excellent validity in terms of relevance to students’ future lives but are not amenable to neatly objective and transparent assessment. Rubrics could still be used for these topics but we need to make students aware of the complexity and subjectivity of assessing them.

References

Bloxham, S., Den-Outer, B., Hudson, J., & Price, M. (2016). Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(3), 466–481.

Hattie, J., and H. Timperley. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research 77 (1): 81–112.

Hounsell, D., McCune, V., Hounsell, J. and Litjens, J. (2008). The quality of guidance and feedback to students. Higher Education Research and Development, 27(1), 55-67.

Kilgour, P., Northcote, M., Williams, A. & Kilgour, A. (2020) A plan for the co-construction and collaborative use of rubrics for student learning, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(1), 140-153

Northedge, A., & McArthur, J. (2009). Guiding students into a discipline: the significance of the teacher. In C. Kreber (Ed.), The University and its disciplines: Teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries (pp. 107–118). New York and London: Routledge.

Reddy, Y. M. & Andrade, H. (2010). A review of rubric use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(4), 435-448, 

McCune, V. (2004). Development of first-year students’ conceptions of essay writing. Higher Education, 47(3), 257-282.

McCune, V. and Rhind, S. (2014). Understanding students’ experiences of being assessed: The interplay between prior guidance, engaging with assessments and receiving feedback. In C. Kreber, C. Anderson, N. Entwistle and J. McArthurs (Eds.). Advances and innovations in university assessment and feedback. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 246-263.

Rommetveit, R. (1974). On message structure: A framework for the study of language and communication. London and New York: Wiley.

Sadler, D. R. (2010). Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 535–550.

Tai, J., R. Ajjawi, D. Boud, P. Dawson, and E. Panadero. (2018). Developing evaluative judgement: Enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. Higher Education, 76 (3), 467–481.