The grading process is time-consuming. It can be overwhelming and frustrating. Grading can even influence what assignments they choose to give to students, anticipating the workload of marking each submission. A solution comes from rubrics, which are benchmarks used in grading to help assess students’ learning.
Rubrics include the criteria for evaluation and the level of performance with descriptions for each. They help students understand what is expected of them and therefore regulate their work according to the demands. Also, rubrics help teachers provide objective feedback to students, facilitating the desired outcome, which is deep learning.
Consequently, rubrics not only facilitate the marking process but they make it objective, concise, and reliable when grading assignments.
Read more: What is the role of rubrics in performance-based education?
The rubric's features are essential because they provide clear guidelines for the teacher. The goal is to reach a consistent grading process.
6 Digital tools that help teachers create effective rubrics
Although pen-and-paper rubrics are generally time-consuming, web-based rubric generators are more efficient. Teachers can access templates that work across the curriculum, various subjects, and learning activities. They can also customize available templates to suit their classes' needs and reuse rubrics anytime.
Here are six digital tools for creating effective rubrics:
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Rubistar
Rubistar is a web-based rubric generator for PBL activities that allow teachers to create or customize premade rubrics for free. Teachers have to register to save and reuse their rubrics. Once created, they can view, edit, analyze or delete rubrics at any time.
The analysis feature provides information regarding how many students received the same rating, whether the assignment was complicated or straightforward, ambiguous or clear for students, and if the criteria of a certain level of performance were hard to reach. As a result, teachers can adapt their rubrics and lessons to suit the students’ needs and ensure progress.
Teachers can choose from various rubrics for oral presentations, research, writing, science, work skills, products, math, art, music, or reading. Then, they can establish each criterion from a list and the levels of performance with their description.
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Rubric Maker
Rubric Maker is a tool that assists teachers in the assessment process, helping them articulate their expectations and how the students will be evaluated. Students receive a complete scheme of goals to reach success.
With this tool, teachers can create quality rubrics using pre-established quality ratings, such as “exceed expectations, meets expectations, needs improvement, and below expectations”, or customize them to suit the needs of each class.
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Quick Rubric
Quick Rubric is a tool used to score assignments based on how students meet specific criteria. Rubrics can be used to evaluate various performance-based assignments, such as oral presentations, essays, or projects. Teachers can create rubrics that have different formats depending on the number of criteria and the levels of quality. The performance ratings can be numerical, descriptive, or both.
With Quick Rubric, teachers can eliminate grading bias due to the specific criteria laid out in the rubric. This translates into teacher scoring accuracy when multiple evaluators use the same rubrics for the same assignment.
The templates provide three scoring levels: proficient, emerging, beginner, but you can personalize the rubrics by editing them or adding new ones. The final rubric contains the title, description, and instructions.
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OrangeSlice: Student Rubric
OrangeSlice: Student Rubric is a Google add-on that makes grading productive and professional. Teachers create, distribute and receive submitted assignments from students through Google Classroom, and Teacher Rubric facilitates the grading process. The rubrics appear in the right half of the Google Docs document to be assessed, and the final grade is a few clicks away.
This tool allows teachers to offer objective feedback to all students while benefiting from a consistent grading process.
When you open an assignment, the add-on assists the grading process. Teachers have to choose first between descending or ascending performance level progression, then between traditional scoring (A, B, C, D, E, F), “great, good, needs more” (which can be changed later), or create a new ranking. Also, teachers have to choose the categories to be evaluated or create new ones before generating the rubric.
Educators can alter the final score by using the options “extra credit,” “late penalty,” or “plagiarized penalty” and then automatically process and introduce the grade details into the students’ Google Docs assignment who can see in detail how they were evaluated. They can also generate holistic and analysis rubrics for a better understanding of student achievement.
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TeAch-nology
TeAch-nology is a website full of resources for teachers, including a large selection of rubrics. Teachers can choose to generate numerous rubrics on different activities or create personalized ones. The templates make grading easy, especially when students can choose how to present their work. They can generate templates suitable for various products, such as essays, posters, or presentations, and ensure they stay objective and maintain fairness even when assessing different outputs for the same task.
Rubrics allow students to evaluate their work or their peers’. With more than five hundred printable rubrics and the general rubric generator, teachers have a rubric suitable for every assignment.
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CYPHER Learning
CYPHER Learning has a rubrics feature that allows teachers to create, edit, save and reuse rubrics for a straightforward grading process. Rubrics are integrated within the assignment submission page. You can create a new rubric for each assignment or reuse the ones in your library.
The CYPHER Learning platform offers a personal library and access to school, organization, and district libraries with available resources such as rubrics created by fellow teachers. Schools can also ensure that grading is objective and consistent by using the same rubric for similar tasks. Moreover, they can ensure transparency and reliability regarding students’ learning levels.
Creating rubrics with CYPHER Learning is easy since teachers can use the template provided by the platform or reuse the ones from the library. When grading, teachers need to select a rubric to automatically insert it into the students’ submission page. With only a few clicks, they can grade their submissions, adjust the grades by subtracting points, for instance, and leave a comment or an attachment as feedback. As a result, students understand their performance by receiving the full details of their evaluation.
To sum up
Rubrics are indispensable tools for a teacher, making grading time-efficient, objective and reliable. They also come with benefits for the students in terms of clear expectations and realistic performance analysis.
