Welcome to our Spring 2010 Rubric Manual!
This series of pages is updated to reflect our rubric procedure during the Spring 2010 Semester, and is intended for instructors using the First-Year Composition Asssessment Rubric. We hope this page will explain common questions and misperceptions about interpreting the language on the rubric form, empowering you to grade with confidence and to empower your students to fully understand the reasons they receive their grades.
Development of online rubric software for our program is underway, and we anticipate piloting this application in a number of classes during the Summer 2010 Semester. We're confident that the software we are developing will be worth the wait, and that it will make the process of grading papers faster, more effecient, and more consistent among course sections.
Until our online rubric is available, we will rely upon hard copies of our re-designed rubric criteria for composition assessment purposes.
The current version of the rubric and scoring criteria document is available in three formats:
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A .docx version, which may not appear correctly without the Futura font
Major Rubric Sections
Click each header to access a page dedicated to a discussion of that section of the rubric. For overarching issues, see the Frequently Asked Questions section below.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did I hear that there's a place on the teachers' site that has more information on the rubric?
Yes! Click here to access our password-protected instructor site, where you can offer your ideas about how sample essays should be graded.
"Scoring Criteria Document?" Isn't that what the rubric is? I don't understand the difference between these two documents.
The two are designed to work together harmoniously. The scoring criteria are designed to help you decide what grades to assign on the rubric (whether paper or online).
For instance, say that you're not sure what grade to give the Focus and Organization section of a student's paper. You could refer to the scoring criteria document to see language that describes what an A, B, C, D, or F looks like for that particular section.
What are the big-picture purposes of this rubric? I don't understand why we even need to have a rubric.
For any large community of people to function, there must be a healthy balance between fostering the creativity of individuals and reining in differences toward the shared practices of the community. One way to picture this is by imagining a ball on the end of a string being spun in circles. The spinning creates a centrifugal force that pushes outward, but the string exerts a centripetal force, keeping the ball from flying into any direction it chooses.
In our writing program, the outward-pushing, centrifugal force is represented by the unique practices of individual instructors and by the technologies that allow them to share these practices with each other on our group sites (e.g. in the side-columns of project pages, in discussion boards, and in wikis). Our writing program is purposefully designed, in other words, to encourage instructors' creativity as they move away from the center in unexpected and pedagogically awesome ways; there's a natural inclination of creative individuals to innovate and expand.
But the program also has centripetal forces that, like the string that keeps the ball from spinning away, ensures a degree of standardization across different sections of our composition classes. Having a shared rubric is one of the primary ways that we assure a common set of shared practices among different instructors. This helps the program in a number of ways: it assures students that the heart of their writing education will be substantially similar between different sections, it provides a common vocabulary for creative instructors to use when branching out to design their own pedagogical materials, and it gives our program greater credence to outsiders who sometimes suspect that writing assessment is a dangerously subjective task.
How should I score each individual section of the rubric on a 1-100 scale?
In fact, the 1-100 scale is a temporary measure until the new version of the online rubric tool is released for the Spring 2010 semester. The 1-100 scale was implemented in Spring 2009 to increase the reliability of the rubric tool. When each section asked instructors to grade a given section of the rubric on, say, a 1-20 or a 1-15 scale, different instructors would at times interpret this differently. For instance, on a 1-20 scale, would a 10 (half of the points) or a 15 (75% of the points) be most closely equivalent to a C?
With a 1-100 scale on each section, this problem is eliminated. Now, instructors can give the score that most closely reflects their years of learning to think in terms of percentages.
It's important to remember as well that the rubric tool automatically performs the weighting math for the instructor. In other words, the final grade is not simply the average of the six section scores (sum of scores divided by 6). Instead, the final score gives the appropriate weight to each section as marked on the online rubric. However, grading by hand can create problems with weighting; you may wish to refer to the grade-translation table.
How was this rubric developed?
The rubric has gone through various minor revisions throughout the years, the most substantial being during Summer 2008, when a group of English department faculty, staff, and graduate students adapted substantial parts of the rubric to better fit the current needs of the first-year composition program. Then, during the fall and winter of 2008, a rubric subcommittee of the FYC policy committee formally recommended a number of adaptations, most of which were adopted for the Spring 2009 version of the rubric, which has stayed relatively stable.