Anatomy of a Rubric

Student walking away from the Gordon Willey building at Durham College, Oshawa campus.

Regardless of the type of rubric used, there are four (4) key components:

  1. Criteria
  2. Criteria standard
  3. Performance levels
  4. Performance descriptor

Explore the following H5P interact with the four (4) components of the rubric. Select the “+” icons next to each number for a description of each component.

Note

This example is of an analytical rubric but the components are the same for a holistic rubric.

Criteria Alignment to Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs)

When choosing grading criteria, it is important to ensure alignment with course (and weekly/module) learning outcomes. The majority (~70%) of the rubric grade should mapped to expectations of learning in the course. This could be in the form of CLO or weekly/module learning outcomes (as these should already be connected to the CLOs). Other components (such as spelling and grammar) can of course be graded, but they should have a lower impact on the assessment grade than the components directly related to course learning.

Example

Spelling and grammar may be assessed but should have a lower weighting than the mapped skill/CLO. Therefore, 70% of the rubric could assess the skill/CLO, 20% for spelling/grammar, and 10% for organization and clarity. This enables students to succeed on the assessment based on the expected course learning. If spelling and grammar are assessed as a CLO they can be included in the 70% of the grading criteria.

Tip

In cases of spelling and grammar, consider using descriptions of how distracting spelling and grammar errors are, rather than reliance on quantity of errors.

Exemplary (4) Proficient (3) Developing (2) Emerging (1)
Correctness of Spelling and Grammar Spelling and/or grammar is error free or has minimal distracting errors. Slight interruption of readability by spelling and/or grammar errors. Grammatical and/or spelling errors distract from the work. Serious impacts on readability by spelling and/or grammatical errors.