Rubrics for QW Assignments

Students will do better work if they know in advance the criteria you will use to grade their papers. Spelling out these criteria and placing them into a simple scoring guide will let students know what you are looking for and will speed up your own grading process. Rubrics can take a variety of forms including:

• Comprehensive matrices listing each assessment element with detailed descriptions of poor, good, better, and best.
• Inventories of of evaluation criteria to be graded "check, plus, minus."
• Lists of broader statements identifying the different performance levels, either with numbers or verbal descriptors.

Rubrics can be used to tally points that determine the ultimate grade or they can be used with holistic grading to provide detailed feedback without extensive comment writing. What follows are some examples:

• John Bean at Seattle University created this detailed rubric (Microsoft Word 36kB Aug26 06) keyed to the sample RAFT assignment discussed on the Types of QW Assignments page.

• Jean Mach and Michael Burke at the College of San Mateo have devised this rubric for the essays in their "Tools for Thought" courses.

• At Carleton, the Quantitative Inquiry, Knowledge and Reasoning Program (QuIRK) has devised a rubric for evaluating quantitative writing (Microsoft Word 71kB Dec7 09). This scoring guide distinguishes between "peripheral" and "central" uses of quantitative elements in student papers. Readers assess how the student employs, implements, communicates and interprets these quantitative elements.

• A good example of a broader, more holistic rubric for quantitative reasoning that includes some references to writing skills has been developed by Portland State University to assess portfolios developed by students in Freshman Inquiry courses.