My oldest concern about education policy and practice is the meaning of grades. I started to wonder about standardized tests in middle school, but my questions about grading practices go back even further than that. Assessment is my longest running obsession.
I have had teachers that would lower a grade because students’ names were not in the correct corner of the page, or the order of name, period and date were wrong. We know that handwriting quality can impact grades. And, as a new teacher, I learned that many of my colleagues kept grade books, but would simply eyeball them to assign a grade for the term, rather than do the simple work of actually averaging the recorded grades. (This was back in he 1990’s, when grade books were all on paper.)
And I never understood why 50% had to be a failing grade, or how anyone could do such good work on a project or paper that it was absolutely perfect (i.e., 100%).
The arbitrary and inconsistent methods used to calculate grades — either for an individual assignment or for a marking period — baffled me, and at times infuriated me. To this day, I do not know what a B+ means. Is it mastery of the content but poor organizational skills? Is it mediocre performance on the content, bu hard work, diligence, sweetness and all that extra credit?
Today, I can defend grades better than I could then, but I still have lots of problems with them.
But rubrics address most of my concerns, at least on the assignment level.
Rubrics lay out what the is relevant to the grade, in their dimensions/traits.
Rubrics lay out what each level of performance should look like
Rubrics can give advance notice to test takers of the criteria.
Rubrics help teachers to be more consistent across students.
Rubrics lay waste to the practice of 50% meaning a failing grade.
Rubrics can give students clear direction on where they need to improve their performance.
Rubrics can help teachers to ignore things that they should ignore.
Writing rubrics is a good exercise to help teachers think about the learning goals they have for students.
This is not to say that rubrics are perfect. Poor rubrics create enormous problems. Teachers who ignore their own rubrics when grading (or who use them improperly) undermine the whole idea of rubrics — and the trust that students should have in them.
But rubrics can be flexible. Rubrics can be tailored for individual assignments, or set up as a grading system to be used over time. Explaining rubrics to students can provide scaffolding for students to self-monitor their own progress and to think about where they want to focus their work and attention.
Moreover, rubrics are invaluable for standardized assessment. When standardized tests use constructed response items (e.g., essays, short answer, fill in the blank, show your work), scorers need guidance and structure to ensure they they are consistent through the day and are consistent with each other as they score responses. Even automated scoring of this kind of item is based on training sampling generated by human scorers using rubrics.
In fact, we cannot use constructed response items on standardized tests without rubrics. If we did, the scoring could not be consistent, and that would violate the very definition of standardized. I have no doubt that improving the quality of our standardized tests to a truly acceptable level requires more constructed response items, which means that I want a lot more rubrics.