Comments on: Pros and Cons of Rubrics

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:51:16 +0000

How can it not be a good thing to help keep instructors honest – from who, themselves. Rubrics allow instructors to set the rules of an assignment which is supposed to be a good thing for students. Yet these instructors feel constrained by students who simply are doing what the instructor has asked them to do in the first place? How can rubrics NOT be a good thing. Why not just ask the students to write a paper with no guidance at all and see if they can guess what the instructor wants on the particular day they happen to turn in the paper. That sort of attitude in any other business would be called fraud – yet in higher education we simply call it Academic Freedom.

By: Susan Williams

Susan Williams — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:50:02 +0000

This was a very interesting post. I have used Rubrics from the beginning of my teaching career in Nursing school. I have found they help me as an instructor and also make it very clear as to what I expect from a student. It also gives me something to stand on should a student grieve their grade. My issue is that even if you give students a rubric, many of them forgo using it and just do the paper the way they want to do it! Drives me insane when this happens. You can lead a student to “water” but you can’t make them “drink.”

By: Karen Shavin

Karen Shavin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:38:46 +0000

I find that most of my students want to know what they need to do to get an ‘A’. Hence, the rubric. No matter how much I refine my rubric, students receive ‘As’ who do not deserve them simply because they meet the technical requirements of the rubric. A good student, who demonstrates understanding and deep thinking about a topic would get the same grade as one who shows only surface understanding. Often, a student with good understanding will miss some minor technical detail and receive a lower score, based on the rubric. I feel they are designed to provide ‘objective’ evidence, in the case when a student contests a grade, and not to encourage thinking and understanding. I long for the ‘good, old days’ when professors were respected and students went to school to learn.

By: Larry Spence

Larry Spence — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:32:58 +0000

Isn’t the problem the quality of the rubric? Helpful rubrics take work to develop and require many trials. Cooky-cutter rubrics are quick but deadly. Too often hasty rubrics become crutches for both instructors and students. And to be honest, we often don’t know what we want from an assignment — having concocted them on the fly. Students suspect as much and resent it. I have found that useful rubrics require that I do the assignment first. But rarely have I had the time to do that.
A more productive discussion would concern how to collaborative create rubrics, how to test them, and how to maintain some banks of exemplars.
The nagging question remains — are they worth the opportunity costs?