This a guest post by Deborah Borman of the Univeristy of Arkansas at Little Rock. The resistance is strong in the Natural State.
I read your article with great interest, as it is the rare voice that stands up against the onslaught of rubrics in higher education.
I am unabashedly anti-rubrics. In my article, Degrading Assessment: Rejecting Rubrics in Favor of Authentic Analysis, 41 Seattle L. Rev. 713 (2018), I advocate to end the trend of using rubrics for assessment of legal analytical writing. As developed through the college admissions process and later integrated into the grading process, standardization in assessment in all education is historically discriminatory. While there are some andragogical uses for rubrics, the potential for discriminatory application and the underlying discriminatory history further underscore the potential damaging effects of using rubrics. Rubrics fail to promote either good learning or good writing. At the legal education level, law schools misconstrue the requirements of American Bar Association (ABA) curriculum standards by using rubrics to implement outcome assessment. The various standards for outcome and assessment cannot be fulfilled without implementing holistic evaluation.
https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2523&context=sulr
I’m not persuaded, for these reasons…
IF you must assign a grade, the students deserve to know *how* they will be graded. Hence, the rubric. No, I don’t think they are great, but as I’ve written elsewhere (citations on request) without a rubric we are in the position of:
Teacher: hit the target.
Student: where is the target.
Teacher: I’ll tell you after you have shot.
Rubrics, after all, are just recipes. Do great chefs need recipes? Of course not. Do those learning to cook need recipes?
Yes.
So for me the problem is not the rubric, but the *necessity* to post a grade. If we get rid of the grading system, then rubrics are no longer essential.