"Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-First Century" by Kathleen Blake Yancey and "Using Rubric to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria" by John Bean

     Outside of one week in an undergraduate course, I never had instruction on how to create a rubric. It is definitely one thing I wish more time had been devoted to since I find the need for rubrics incredibly important.

     My first experience as a teacher with rubrics came when I had to prepare my juniors for the HSPA. We would use the actual rubric the state scorers would use when grading their tests. Every writing assignment came with a copy of the persuasive rubric and every OEQ came with the reading rubric. We even had large laminated copies on the walls as constant reminders to the students.

     It was an analytic rubric that broke the writing down into categories such as content, structure, mechanics, etc. It's not until now that I realize it was erroneously called a holistic rubric based on how they are defined in Bean's article.

     I always hated using it. One of the reasons was the degree of the descriptors in the categories. Bean points out that these descriptors are open to interpretation, and he's right. Words like most, some, and few are difficult to anchor to a number. And is the criteria the same for each student, or do you have different ideas of what most means depending on the student?

     I appreciate the idea of a "universal reader" grading everything. I never really thought about who was grading my work when I was a student. I definitely didn't think of a person with preferences grading it. I guess I pictured a machine that graded everything without fault; any mistake could not escape it's eye.

     I've witnessed how different disciplines within education could score the same paper in drastically different ways. A few weeks ago, I mentioned how at one workshop, the same essay gained rave reviews by the English teachers, but poor scores from the history teachers. Why? The paper had creative aspects to it that were not valued by one discipline, echoing the results of Diederich.

     A few years back, a fellow senior teacher developed a holistic rubric that we were able to use for every writing assignment that was given. Yancey points out that holistic rubrics met the standard of consistent scoring, something we found to be true, which is why we were able to use it so much.

     Now, every writing assignment is accompanied by the rubric that will be used to score it. The students are required to submit it with the finished product, but they must first grade their own essays as a way of assessing whether they understand how they will be graded. My students have certainly benefited  from my increased knowledge of rubrics.