Welcome to the Teaching & Learning Guide for Building Better Rubrics! 

This guide includes tips and resources designed to help you: 

• Recognize the importance of using rubrics

• Identify the components of a rubric

• Determine the best criteria for rubrics

• Align rubrics to course objectives 

• Write rubrics that assess the appropriate components of an assignment

• Request support from your Instructional Design Partner and the Technology Service Desk.

Rubrics are a useful addition to any assignment including research papers, discussion boards, speeches, and portfolios. They can help students understand the expectations for an assignment while also making grading easier for instructors. Rubrics can help both students and instructors approach an assignment in clearly navigable components. 

Having clear expectations for each rubric component, and the associated points, allows students to have more agency in their grades and helps them self-assess. With clear guidelines, students can choose to focus on meeting the requirements for the grade that they want to achieve, and they don’t have to guess if the assignment meets the A, B, C, or D criteria.

Rubrics can also be more impartial. Instructors who use rubrics are more likely to grade consistently for each student, promoting fairness and decreasing bias. Rubrics ensure that an instructor’s grading standards don’t change per student or over time. The consistency of rubrics can be especially beneficial when there are multiple graders, such as a course with a GA. Rubric grading is also faster and more straightforward, so instructors can use their time more efficiently and still offer enough clear, useful feedback. 

Students also benefit from rubrics because they are a way for instructors to clearly communicate student performance. Some students may feel more comfortable being graded from a rubric since it allows them to see exactly what their score is in each criterion. Students will know exactly what their strengths and weaknesses are and be able to focus their energy on where they can improve. Plus, if students have a question about their grade, they can reference the rubric and instructor comments (Rubrics: An unexpected tool for mitigating bias, 2021). 

Analytic rubrics are the most commonly used. They will look familiar to most instructors with their standard grid design. An analytic rubric lists the specific criteria for the assignment in the left column. Performance levels are listed at the top. The remaining boxes break down the levels of performance. For example, the levels for addressing each criterion may be “Exceeds Expectations,” “Satisfactory,” “Developing,” and “Unsatisfactory.” Each level is assigned a different number of points. Each criterion can also have a different total point value. The right column lists the total.

The following is a standard rubric template:

An analytic rubric is used most commonly because it allows plenty of space for instructors to provide clear and detailed feedback. In Canvas, the rubric tool allows instructors to leave holistic comments and comments for each criterion. 

Rubrics communicate to students what we think is important and what we want students to learn. That’s why when creating a rubric, it’s important to make sure your course objectives align with the assignment. In other words, your rubric should assess the assignment based on specific course objectives. Each assignment for your course helps you evaluate whether students are demonstrating skills that successfully meet the objectives; the rubric allows you to break down these skills into accomplishable tasks. 

For example, in an English class, a course learning objective may be that students “Write a persuasive essay with proper MLA in-text citations and works cited page.” Your assignment rubric might contain the following row, in addition to rows that evaluate an essay’s persuasive qualities.

An assignment will usually assess multiple course learning objectives, so rubrics contain multiple rows to address these broad goals. 

It may be helpful to create a course map before you begin creating your rubrics. In your course map, list all assignments and note which course objectives you will assess for each assignment. Then, as you build your rubrics, you can review the course objectives using your map. 

Consider what tasks should be measured based on your course objectives for each assignment and what characteristics define the successful completion of each task. Brookhart (2013) identifies some characteristics to think about: 

• Appropriate: The criteria represent standards, objectives, or instructional goals that students need to learn. 

• Definable: There is a clear, agreed-upon meaning of the criteria.

• Observable: The criteria is something that can be observed, and measured, by an instructor (or someone else other than the student). 

• Distinct: Each criterion is different from the others; each covers a separate aspect of the learning experience and performance. 

• Complete: All of the criteria come together to build a complete view of all of the learning outcomes the assessment is intended to measure. 

• Able to be described along a continuum: The criteria can be described at different performance levels, (i.e. an “A” or “Exceeds Expectations” looks like this, and a “Meets Expectations” or a “B” looks like that). 

Some questions you can ask to help you write your rubrics include: 

• What do I want students to know how to do? 

• What kinds of tasks will help me evaluate these skills?

• What does success look like for these skills?

Here are some additional tips for more effective rubrics. 

• Map out the distribution of your points first. Decide how many criteria you will assess for the assignment, then consider the number of total points. From there, you can distribute the points among the criteria. 

• Use consistent leveling. Each criterion should have the same number of assessment categories. For example, Exceeds Expectations, Satisfactory, Developing, and Unsatisfactory. 

• Once you have the basic outline of your rubric with the point distribution, add detailed descriptions. 

• Use clear, direct, and encouraging language. 

• Your Criteria description should align with the course objective you are assessing.

• The assessment categories should describe what the assignment should do at each point level or what specifically is being assessed. For example, “Uses MLA style with only minor mistakes and/or has 75% of the required citations for this assignment.”

• Make sure your students have access to the rubric before they begin the assignment so they can use it to self-assess.

• Draft your rubric on paper or in a Word document and then copy and paste it into the Canvas rubric tool.

The following Canvas guides can help you create rubrics and use them to grade your assignments. 

How do I add a rubric in a course?

How do I add a rubric to an assignment?

How do I add a rubric to a graded discussion?

How do I add a rubric to a quiz?

How do I manage rubrics in a course?

These example rubrics were created by Instructional Designers in the Center for Development, Design, and Delivery. Contact your Instructional Designer for help creating your own rubrics. 

Discussion Rubric (25 Points)

Research Paper Rubric - Ethnography (100 Points)

Rhetorical Analysis Rubric (150 points)

Speech Rubric (50 points)

Project Proposal Rubric (250 points)

• "5 Features of a Highly Effective Rubric." TeAchnology. https://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/rubrics/effectiverubrics.html.

• Brookhart, S. M. (2013). How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.

• "Creating High Quality Rubric." Information Technology University of Florida. https://citt.ufl.edu/resources/assessing-student-learning/providing-effective-feedback/creating-high-quality-rubrics/.

• Eberly Center. "Grading and Performance Rubric." Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/rubrics.html.

• "Rubrics: An Unexpected Tool for Mitigating Bias." Colorado School of Mines. March 8, 2021. https://trefnycenter.mines.edu/rubrics_bias/.

• "Tips to Writing a Strong Rubric." Quick Rubric. https://www.quickrubric.com/about/tips-to-writing-a-strong-rubric.

• Wike Loyola, Sarah. "5 Tips for a More Meaningful Rubric." Edutopia. June 8, 2015. https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/5-tips-more-meaningful-rubric.

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