My only experience using rubrics to assess writing came when I was an AP World History reader. I lasted only two years. It’s not easy to read hundreds of examples of the same essay, over and over, for a week. The best description I have heard of an AP reading is that is a cross between summer camp and the gulag. The summer camp part is what happens when the grading ends and everyone heads out to play tennis or go on group runs in the evening. The gulag part is when you are stuck at a desk, reading essays through the lens of a rubric.
Back when I was reader the formula was: 2 points for a thesis statement, 2 points for use of evidence, 2 points for “point of view” (AP-talk for rudimentary source criticism), 2 points for something that now escapes me, and then if all those were met, 2 additional points based on a subjective assessment of the quality of the essay.
It worked reasonably well. Occasionally you would get semiliterate essay that nonetheless ticked all the boxes and you had to give it 8 points. But mostly the essays that I read were just okay; they were drab, formulaic, efforts to match the requirements of the rubric, which are well know to AP teachers and carefully taught in AP courses.
The only interesting essay I read in those two summers was from a student who clearly had no interest in the rubric or in doing well on the test. Instead, she wrote an essay about herself. I don’t remember all the details, but in effect she was dating a younger schoolmate and both her parents and the boy’s parents disapproved. She described her desire to finally turn eighteen and be free to make her own choices and ended by confiding that she was pregnant, something that neither her parents nor her boyfriend knew. I have no idea whether this was true or if it was a work of fiction. But it was well-written in the sense that it made its point and it’s the only AP essay I can still remember twenty years later.
I spend a lot of time thinking about writing, my own and other people’s—both my students’ and that of writers I admire. (If I could steal anyone’s style and voice it would be Caitlin Flanagan’s.)
So I read with interest John Warner’s blog post in IHE called, “Why Can’t My New Employees Write?” In it he quotes the work of Michelle Kenney who says this about the rubric heavy teaching of writing that is characteristic of the American high school:
This approach results in what high school teacher Michelle Kenney calls “good enough writing…formulaic essays devoid of creativity and well-developed critical thinking, yet proficient enough to pass a test, raise school graduation rates, or increase the number of students receiving AP credit.”
Warner compares the use of rubrics in the teaching of writing to training wheels for beginning cyclists. Training wheels allow novice riders to experience something that feels like riding a two wheeler but is fundamentally different, and, as it turns out, training wheels actually hinder children’s ability to balance a bike. The best way to teach people to ride is to use what he calls a balance bike (which sounds like a velocipede) which riders balance but push along with their feet rather than using pedals. You learn to balance the velocipede/balance bike and then it’s easy to learn to pedal a real bike.
Of course, assessment is part of what drives the use of rubrics. Nothing does more to create the illusion of objectivity and scientific accuracy in measuring student learning than a rubric. The VALUE rubrics championed by the AAC&U (and probably the Lumina Foundation too, which seems to be the source of many bad ideas) are an excellent example of this type of thinking.
Down in the comments section of Warner’s IHE post is this comment from Warner himself:
I think it’s about anxiety, a belief that if we can’t measure it, it’s not important. I believe it’s getting worse because we have more tools of measurement, more data, and there’s a borderline magical faith that this data will show us the way.
Just as no one shows up for a bike race with training wheels on, no one uses a rubric for writing that is really intended to communicate something to a real audience. The author of the AP essay I mentioned broke with the rubric and said something she actually wanted someone else to understand. I have had many essays and articles rejected in my writing life (including the best essay I have ever written, which has been rejected repeatedly by all kinds of publications). Not once has an editor told me that my essay scored 6 out of 10 on their rubric and thus would not be published.
Real writing is not done with rubrics. Students should learn to write by doing real writing.