I have always struggled with grading. It’s my least favorite part of teaching. I am all about giving students feedback, but I just don’t feel that grades are the right way to do that. If you want to read more about my feelings about grading and my current practices, check out this post on grading conferences.
What I want to talk about today is how I’ve been using rubrics differently. I think everyone and their brother knows that rubrics are where it’s at in the education world today. Rubrics give students clear expectations and guidelines. They (seemingly) remove objectivity from grading assignments such as essays. Seems like a good solution, right, in theory? Ah, in theory.
My school developed rubrics for writing, participation, and classwork a few years ago. They are each on a four- or five-point scale. What I struggled with was my hardworking writers scoring a 3 out of 4 on the rubric, and then that translating into a 75% in the gradebook. My students’ grades were just not where I thought they should be. Ava, for instance, was definitely an A-level student, but the rubrics were dragging her down. In another example, Ron worked his. butt. off. But because of his limited capabilities would put him below a 50, and that just didn’t seem fair.
I spent a good portion of my summer researching and playing with math(!) to try to get my rubrics to match what I thought students deserved. Then, I discovered Roobrix. The people behind Roobrix agree with me: we aren’t transferring rubric scores to points properly. I’ll link to Roobrix’s explanation here. And the converter tool is here.
Play around with it a little. Try the traditional method of scoring via a rubric and Roobrix’s converter and decide which grade more accurately portrays your students’ abilities (if you like the traditional way better, no shade here; I just want to offer the option).
When you use the Roobrix converter, make sure you alter the settings to fit your criteria/setup.
What are your thoughts about rubrics? Would you use the Roobrix converter tool? Let me know!
Beyond the Test 