Rubrics set up - per assignment or broadly at account level

[oneilllj]

I am seeking feedback on how various institutions are setting up rubrics. 

I am currently testing a few options:

• One rubric per assessment piece that a student will submit, set up in the relevant curriculum area sub account (pros - helps with naming conventions and minimises chances of incorrect criteria being linked/cons - can be a very large list of rubrics;
• A large rubric with all of the possible criteria relevant to the curriculum area, requiring editing and reusing across multiple assessments (pros - all listed in one place and can be selected as needed/cons - makes it difficult for editing and reusing across multiple assignments).

We are not using Rubrics Enhancement because our assessment criteria usually exceed more than five points, so the view in the enhancements option is not suitable to our needs. 

Any feedback or suggestions would be great.

Thanks

Jen 

[JeffCampbell]

Currently, our department is working on refining a single rubric we can use for all projects. Each of us may be at different points in our curriculum and some of us have units other do not use. This way, regardless of the unit or project, we have a common assessment strategy. We have previously had different rubrics for different projects, which became more cumbersome to track and did not help ensure we were all assessing what we felt were the common objectives we all teach.

As for the Enhanced Rubrics, if your concern is a limit of 5 points based on the images, be aware that you can change this. One of our department members was toying with adjusting the point values and changed her max points to 10. Everything automatically shifted to keep the same point spread for each level.

[oneilllj]

I like the idea of a single rubric, the difficulty is that all of our assessment is due at the same time. It's probably easiest for our junior years for a single rubric as they are usually marked on the same criteria and scoring no matter which curriculum area.

Our senior years have a lot more variety to the point that one assessment criteria could be used for one assessment piece and the mark is 5, but the next assessment piece the same criteria is 10. This is where editing the criteria in a single sub account rubric will be difficult to manage because of the need to edit. (Assessment criteria and scores are set by our overarching curriculum body so we are unable to change the marking system).

Enhanced Rubrics provides such a different view when marking with more than five points - it can make it even more confusing for staff to mark appropriately given the scaling doesn't tend to end up matching the traditional format. As we are only at the start of our rubrics journey, the more we can make it look and feel as easy as possible and behave in a natural way the better. 

We will keep testing some options, but I have a great IT team who have been able to import our assessment criteria/scores directly into Canvas and stored in the Rubrics navigation menu. This makes life a lot easier

[paul_fynn]

I did some work looking at the possibility of setting UK Degree Apprenticeship requirements as Mastery standards / outcomes in the form of Knowledge ,Skills and Behaviours - which can be quite numerous, and came to the conclusion that it was much easier to set a template which incorporated all the outcomes/criteria which could be deleted from than it would be to expect colleagues to search for, find and add the outcomes.

So for what it's worth, the second approach that you've described seems sound. 

[oneilllj]

If I knew the second approach would cope with editing assessment criteria (only scores, not the names/titles) it would probably sway me more towards this option. Are you aware of any workarounds for this?

We often have the case that one assessment criteria could be used during the year and but it will have a different score each time. So making a group set up could be challenging.

[paul_fynn]

I think you need to do some testing with a dummy course and staff users, @oneilllj 

Essentially when a Rubric is deployed it immediately becomes a local clone of the original, so it then shouldn't be an issue to make local modifications. From that point of view one approach is to start with a master root account rubric with all possible criteria/scoring built in, which can then be customised through deletions at local level (easier to knock down than build up).

I would be extremely cautious about having differentiated 'marks out of' - our institution only ever marks out of 100 - if you get down to scoring out of five your standard deviaton (demonstrating differentiation of achievement and grading) goes out the window ....

[oneilllj]

Hi @paul_fynn 

Thanks for the feedback. 

For our senior years courses, all the marks and scores for assessment criteria within this are set by our curriculum board, so we have to ensure that the marks are set up accordingly. Hence a need for variations of scores/rubric scores etc.

We are running a test this term to see how we go with importing specific rubrics for each assessment piece directly into the relevant blueprints. Hopefully this will help us.

Thanks

Jen