ABSTRACT
Rubrics pervade today's higher education landscape. U.S. provosts recently identified rubrics are one of the top three most valuable or important approaches for assessing undergraduate learning outcomes. A checklist is a list of elements present in student work. A rating scale is a list of traits or criteria for student work accompanied by a rating scale marking the frequency or quality of each trait. Analytic rubrics have also been called full rubrics or descriptive rubrics. Holistic rubrics describe how to make an overall judgment about the quality of work, through narrative descriptions of the characteristics of work at each performance level. The VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) rubric project found that 'actually testing the rubrics on student work was essential to the creation of useful rubrics'. Rubrics can benefit from consultation and collaboration with external experts as well as institutional colleagues. Technological tools for developing and using rubrics have grown in recent years.
