Writing rubrics work if you do
Fit them to your teaching situation

Educational rubrics, the paper grader's equivalent of to-do lists, significantly reduce the time you have to spend assessing and grading student writing. (Unclear about what a rubric is? Click to learn how to define rubric.)

However, to get suitable writing rubrics to use during the school year, you have to do some up-front work to fit them to your classes and your overall writing writing assessment strategy.

You may be able to adapt someone else’s evaluation form to your situation, but it’s unlikely that you can use it for your writing assessments without changes.

It's better to make your own rubrics and not at all difficult using your word processor's tables function. Fortunately, the time needed for creating rubrics to order is very small compared to the amount of work they will save you.

An aside: The educational use of rubric has not found its way into many standard dictionaries. Use a term like grading form, evaluation guide or even matrix instead when talking to students or parents.

While writing rubrics do help teachers grade papers somewhat evenhandedly, they are not really objective.

The rubrics also don’t eliminate the need to write personal comments. You still need to respond to the student in a one-to-one way.

Let rubric keep you from burnout

A convenient time to prepare writing rubrics is when you are preparing your year's goals and objectives. It is much easier to judge how strenuous your academic program is going to be if you spell out in black on white how much grading you have to do to accomplish it.

For example, if you have 17 grammar rules you want students to observe in their writing, you need to put each one of them on your assessment rubric.

After you do that, estimate how many students you will have to teach. 17 grammar rules x 130 students x 1 essay every two weeks = nervous exhaustion by November.

It's much preferable to teach two grammar rules to 130 students and have everyone of those 130 students able to apply those rules in their writing.

To learn how to list specific goals in your writing rubrics, look at a persuasive essay rubric I created for one of my classes.

Assign points to writing components

The second step in preparing your rubrics is to identify what you will consider competent writing in a specific class and assign point values to its components.

Isn’t competent writing the same everywhere?

Yes — and no.

We might be able to agree in general terms on what is acceptable writing — like correct spelling, for example — but the precise writing standards that apply when writing a chemistry lab report don’t apply to a newspaper editorial or a limerick.

More important, the standard by which you judge the competence of a seventh grader are not likely to be the same as those you use when evaluating the work of college sophomores.

Using a grading guide should also keep you from correcting student papers. Correcting is the students’ work, not yours. You may point out between one and three significant errors in the student’s writing, but you should not correct or edit their work.

Finally, a rubric should keep you honest. Most of us try not to be influenced too much by the names on the papers. I find, though, that when I’m tired, everybody’s grade drops. I rely on my evaluation guides to keep me from grading my students harshly just because I feel crabby.

Besides using writing rubrics as grading guides, you can use them to teach students how to monitor their own work. What they do for themselves, you don't have to do for them.

And that, my friends, is how using writing rubrics really saves you time.