Rubrics Overview

Rubrics supply a framework for assessing student work and help to establish a common vocabulary for discussing outcomes and achievement for a particular assignment. There are several benefits to using rubrics for your assignments including: they provide clear grading criteria to your students before they submit work, they standardize the assessment process across students, and they can significantly speed up the grading process.

You can add rubrics to assignments, quizzes, and graded discussions.

In this video, you will learn how to create and manage rubrics at the course level.

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Creating Rubrics

Rubrics can be created directly in an assignment or independent of an assignment in the course Rubrics tab.

Rubrics will be displayed in different places, depending on the type of assignment the rubric is attached to.

Rubric Types

There are three different ways to use rubrics in Canvas to assess student work:

Rubrics as a reference.
Use rubrics to help students know exactly what you are expecting. You can use the rubric to provide feedback to students without it impacting their grades. Grades can be assigned separately. To do this, in the settings for the rubric, leave the "Use this rubric for assignment grading" unchecked.
Rubrics for grading.
Use rubrics as a grading tool. Select the rating level for each criterion and Canvas will add the points to the total score for the assignment. Make sure to check the box for "Use this rubric for assignment grading" to do this.
Rubrics to grade and supply free-form commentary.
Use rubrics as a grading tool. Manually enter a point value for each criterion and add a comment instead of selecting a specific rating level. This approach may be particularly useful for formative assignments or assignments with more flexible expectations. Free-form comments can be saved for reuse on subsequent submissions to the same assignment and for use in subsequent terms.

Rubrics can also be used to assess institutional, programmatic, and course-level outcomes for accreditation purposes. Check with your program or department for specific information about data collection efforts to which you may be expected to contribute.

Click here for more information on Rubrics.

ACE Rubrics
If you are teaching an ACE course, you need to evaluate at least one assignment from each of your students each semester using the appropriate ACE rubric. This information is then used by the university to assess how well students at the university are meeting the ACE objectives. To help with ACE reporting, the appropriate rubrics are all available through Canvas. The following link gives instructions for integrating ACE Rubrics into your Canvas course(s): https://ace.unl.edu/assessment