Rubrics Redux

I use rubrics. Sometimes. When I think the occasion warrants their use.

 

I’m also skeptical of rubrics. I they think are over-pushed in certain educational circles, where they are the darling of assessment strategies, but sometimes they can be CRAAP. Like any tool, they can be used well or they can be used poorly. When a rubric becomes an assessment checklist that narrows the students’ view while promoting an instrumentalist approach (see for example Torrance, H. Assessment in Education, 2007, 14, 281-294), we would do well as educators to abandon it.

 

Rubrics are useful for qualitative formative assessment, and so you would expect to see them more often utilized in the humanities, arts, and some of the social sciences. They are sometimes utilized in the sciences, most often to evaluate presentations, projects, and other creative activity. I highly recommend Royce’s 30-year old article on the use of formative assessment in such situations. We should be careful when using rubrics, not to inadvertently promote the Swiss-cheese learning of our students.

 

So it was refreshing to read “Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education” by Ragupatha and Lee (Chapter 3 in Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education, 2020). They weave a careful thread of how rubrics can be effectively used as scaffolds to improve student learning, while being aware of the aforementioned pitfalls. It’s not an easy road because Goodhart’s Law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) is always lurking close by.

 

Ragupatha and Lee provide some constructs and examples, but these remain mostly at the general level, and appropriately so. I appreciated how they walk the reader through different types of rubrics and their purposes. I found their broader approach thoughtful, and they did not sound like the oft-encountered narrow-minded educational-ese singing the praises of rubrics as the panacea to all educational (assessment) evil. Lee is also in chemistry, and perhaps that influenced my positive reading of the article. Their article is well-researched, and I found myself reading some of their cited references, the mark of a worthwhile article! Still, the danger looms of over-playing rubrics, especially as they continue to acquire an underlying business-management tone. What was old becomes new again, both in the business world and in education.