6.3: Rubrics Oversimplify the Writing Process

Author: Crystal Sands, Walden University and Southern New Hampshire University, @ CrystalDSands.

I still remember my first rubric-assessment training I received from an educational assessment expert. I stared at the categories from a sample rubric used to assess writing and began to panic. I knew there were things that happened in my classroom, things that happened in writing, that were not listed on that rubric. I was a new writing teacher in my first tenure-track job, afraid to speak up, but I finally did. “There’s so much more to writing than what’s in this rubric,” I said. A few other faculty members in the training session clapped and cheered. I had not used rubrics when I assessed my students’ writing before, and I was about to be required to do so by my institution. I was resistant, and I was not alone.

Using rubrics to assess writing is a common, but sometimes controversial, practice with a laundry list of pros and cons. While I had some strong resistance to using rubrics early in my career, I came to see their value before long. In that first job, I was teaching 13 sections of basic writing classes per year, each of which was capped at 30 students. Before I learned how to use rubrics, I did not leave my house most weekends because I was too busy providing feedback on essays. After I completed my rubric-assessment training, I found that I was able to leave my house on the weekends more often, although still not much. That alone was enough to sell me, as I was barely handling my heavy grading load.

Opponents of rubrics argue, and understandably so, that there is no way to reduce writing to a rubric, no matter how strong said rubric might be. Rubrics that set out to provide a predetermined focus for evaluating a piece of writing cannot possibly capture all that there is to a text. Five or six categories, or even eight or ten, would not be enough to measure the complexity of even a simple

text. As Bob Broad noted in What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, while good rubrics effectively capture some of the important elements in assessing writing, they do not capture all of them. Does using a rubric send the message that we are only evaluating the elements of the rubric? Perhaps. But I would argue that this does not have to be so.

Despite their limitations, rubrics have become a common method of evaluating writing for a wide variety of sound reasons. Research shows that students can benefit from rubric assessment when rubrics are presented and discussed in advance. Knowing basic expectations in advance can help students respond well to an assignment and ease their writing anxiety, which is one of the biggest struggles my students, especially online students, face during their writing processes. Because rubrics provide clear expectations and assessment criteria, students also improve self-assessment and critical thinking skills when they are used. As students engage in conversations about the rubrics and then work with course rubrics to self-evaluate, they are engaging in the writing process in a more confident manner.

While not all rubrics are created equally, my experiences working with my students to build rubrics for essay assessment confirms the findings of research indicating that having students help develop rubrics produces a significant increase in engagement in peer review and self-evaluation. In my classes, students were engaged and reported high satisfaction. I was working at a community college with a high number of non-traditional working adults. They approached their educations pragmatically and did not appreciate being evaluated in a way that would be a mystery to them. For these inexperienced writers, the rubrics provided an opportunity for transparency, which was extremely important, especially as a high number of them suffered from some fairly extreme writing anxiety. I made it clear that even the best rubrics could not encompass everything I was looking for in a text, but the rubrics gave me a short-cut in providing my students with some basic information about what makes a good piece of writing. This guidance was especially important for students who were coming to my classes with little to no knowledge of what might make a strong college essay. On top of this, my grading load was reduced, and because I was working with nearly 400 students per year, this was important.

As an alternative to an over-simplified dismissal of rubric use, I argue for something in the middle—an understanding that good rubrics can play a role as a part of writing assessment. I have worked for several institutions that required standard rubrics for all courses, and I cannot defend these rubrics. They have often been extremely brief, limiting, and seem to focus more on program assessment than on providing students with quality feedback. And while program assessment is another potential benefit of rubrics, I would argue that a rubric used for program assessment should not be the same as a specific, detailed rubric written with a student audience in mind. My experience as both an administrator and a faculty member has taught me that, while program assessment and student feedback should be separate, this is not always the case in all programs or institutions. However, I think dismissing rubrics outright is a mistake because doing so refuses to acknowledge the benefits rubrics provide students and teachers, particularly for the latter in terms of decreased workloads. We deserve at least part of a weekend off.

A paradigm shift that explores a balance between rubrics as a part of writing assessment, and the realities of the teaching loads of many writing faculty would be most beneficial to our field. The reality that there are elements of writing that rubrics of any reasonable length cannot capture should not be ignored. However, neither can the research pointing to the benefits of more timely feedback and stronger student self-evaluation. Additionally, my work with rubrics has aided students struggling with fear and confidence issues. And, while some could argue that rubrics might provide students with a kind of false confidence, I would argue that the benefits of the greater confidence I have seen in my students outweighs any problems associated with students thinking writing is somehow being reduced to the rubric. In fact, I would argue that conversations about rubrics can prevent this kind of thinking from occurring in the first place. I let my students know that the rubrics I use provide descriptions for the key elements I am looking for, but I explain that there are more elements, some of which I won’t know until I see them. We discuss writing as a complex beast, and the rubric discussion gives me a great opportunity for this. Additionally, if a faculty member can use rubrics to cover key elements of assessment, and then include several more specific or unique comments on the student writing, then we are not, as some might suggest, using rubrics to replace written feedback.

Further Reading

For more information on the use of rubrics in writing instruction and evaluation, see Bob Broad’s What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, which provides a thorough exploration and critique of rubrics based on a long-term study. See also Danielle D. Stevens and Antonia J. Levi’s Introduction to Rubrics. This work provides a detailed look at some of the benefits of well-made rubrics. Anders Jonsson and Gunilla Svingby also explore the potential benefits of rubrics in a review of 75 studies in “The Use of Scoring Rubrics: Reliability, Validity, and Educational Consequences” from Educational Research Review. In “Scoring Rubrics and the Material Conditions of our Relations with Students” from Teaching English in the Two Year College, David Martins explores the conditions of our work and our connections to rubrics. Finally, in Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson argues against the use of rubrics in writing assessment.

Keywords

critical thinking, faculty course loads, rubrics, self-evaluation, writing assessment

Author Bio

Crystal Sands earned her Ph.D. in rhetoric from Texas Woman’s University in 2005. She has nearly 20 years of experience teaching writing at the college level. Having worked in the field as a full-time adjunct, a writing program director, and a director of an award-winning online writing lab, Sands has a wide variety of experiences working with students, teaching, and assessing writing. She is now an adjunct writing instructor at Walden University and Southern New Hampshire University, a full-time mom, and a hobby farmer with her husband, Ron. Her twitter handle is @ CrystalDSands.