Student-Centred Rubrics: Cracking the Grading Matrix Code so your Students Don’t Have To. Part 1

Part 1: We Need to Talk about Rubrics

Rubrics are notoriously difficult to get right. But wait - are they? Or do we expect too much from ourselves if we write our rubrics alone, or settle for minor adaptations to a rubric from a similar module?

I hear sometimes that rubrics aren’t used much by our students, that they don’t really inform the grading of their work in the meaningful way that we want them to, and they can feel more of an administrative task than a useful resource. But they have the power to be so much more. I have a vision for transparent rubrics that make our expectations and values clear to all students, supporting them to plan and target their focus, informing conversations with co-markers and supporting the creation of action-focused feedback.

The main problem I see is that rubrics often aren’t very accessible. This leads to another problem: they aren’t used much. This is a missed opportunity to ensure clarity of  the assessment task for students and consistency in grading for co-markers.

In this two-part blog – Part 2 due towards the end of Term 2 – I suggest steps to harness the power of your rubric, and I put forward a set of Principles that both capitalise on observed best practice and respond to the challenges identified.

What are rubrics even for?

For students: to get clear and meaningful information and next steps about what they need to do to achieve the grade that they are aiming for. To describe the characteristics of work that you value in a submission. To tell students how to do well in your assessment. In essence, to ‘make transparent’ how markers are grading work. (Gonsalves & Lin, 2024)

For markers: to inform and facilitate the awarding of grades with parity and a shared understanding of characteristics that co-markers are looking for in submissions. Done well, rubrics can also be a tool for you to keep your students on track in the days approaching the submission deadline, and can also facilitate targeted, action-focused feedback. (Andrade, 2023)

I find elements of these qualities in the rubrics that I see, but usually within a larger picture of overly academic, subjective wording that is difficult to read, both in language and layout.

Let’s break this down.

What exactly are the problems?

• Visual inaccessibility: I hear from lecturers that they don’t think their students have looked at the rubric since the first day of the module, that the rubric is available in the module guide, but that many students access course information on their phone. Even on a desktop screen, I see visually complicated columns, with justified text compounding this. Have you viewed your rubric on a mobile device? Avoid using justified text to avoid accessibility.
• Subjectivity: I see grade descriptors that contain a skill or a desired feature of the work. But they only describe the difference between the levels with one or two adjectives. The problem with these adjectives arises when they range from the systematic-but-subjective ‘satisfactory, good, very good, excellent’ to the imaginative-but-nonetheless-still-subjective ‘sophisticated’, ‘authoritative’, ‘apt’ and ‘creative’. Subjectivity is an arch enemy of a transparent rubric – how will the student know if they have achieved the learning outcome?
• Theoretical rather than contextualised: I see the Section 15A General Grading Descriptors in the NTU Quality Handbook being used as exemplars, with sentences replicated and briefly amended, instead of being used as levelling guides to cross-reference to. This makes the grade description quite theoretical and decontextualised.
• Limited accessibility to the whole grading band: I see rubrics where I am unable to decipher what students need to do to attain a first-level grade. Do all your students functionally understand how to achieve a first?
• Vague language: I see language that is systematic but difficult to understand, that is too vague and not descriptive enough to be useful. This could look like ‘Analysis demonstrates an excellent level of insight’, rather than something more specific, such as ‘Analysis identifies relevant current theories and critiques their application in the context of the project, putting forward new learning to extend the theory’.
• Highly academic language: I see language that many students will find difficult to understand without a glossary.

Why is this important?

In identifying these challenges, it becomes clear that some rubrics are not accessible enough for students to use to inform the creation of their work. If our rubrics show these challenges, it means that there are barriers in our rubrics that prevent students from engaging with them meaningfully, which will impact the quality of their submission.

Students have a limited amount of cognitive capacity for each assessment. Therefore, according to Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory (1988, 2024), we need to minimise the cognitive work that students need to do in order to figure out how to do well in our assessment, so that they have plenty of capacity left to actually undertake  the assessment. We can do this by making our rubrics transparent and useful. In Part 2 of this blog I will share my set of Student-Focused Rubric-Writing Principles, for you to follow. It’s also worth noting that students don’t know what is missing from the rubric, so we need to both understand and then translate our internal marking criteria that lives in our heads, into the rubric .

This will impact on some students much more than others. Some students experience additional challenges to accessing learning, such as:

• Having a first language other than English: unclear language in rubrics can exacerbate difficulties in interpretation
• Managing paid work or caring responsibilities: additional tasks might not be possible due to limits on time
• Disabilities that mean that more effort is required to access and process learning materials
• Neurodiversity meaning that large amounts of text might be difficult to access

Students experience intersecting challenges, which exacerbate the impacts of these barriers. Some students don’t have as much cultural capital as others, due to a wide range of factors including Success for All characteristics. These barriers can contribute to awarding gaps and affect degree outcomes. As emphasised by the Office for Students in England (2020) and discussed by Sabri (2022), we need to actively consider causality and inequality in students’ degree outcomes. We need to take responsibility for being proactive in how we identify and remove barriers to students’ engagement.

Next steps

• Look out for my Effective Rubric Principles blog towards the end of Term 2.
• Book a place on my Rubric-Writing Workshops (NTU Log-in required) to work on your own rubrics in a structured, facilitated session, alongside other NTU colleagues.
• Take a look at the Accessible contextualised rubric examples in my Professional Development Pathway for Assessment and Feedback on Thrive (NTU Log-in required).
• Read this research project overview: Democratising assessment rubrics: Making assessment rubrics more accessible for international students, the accompanying Poster Guide for Academics and Poster Guide for International Students (Gonsalves, 2023).
• Get in touch with me if you have thoughts that you would like to share. I am creating a set of supportive resources in this area and would like to incorporate your context.

With special thanks to Ken Liston, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in UG and PG Music and Events at Confetti, for sharing his learning on the application of these principles in his classroom.