About Rubrics

Rubrics are an assessment tool used to evaluate an activity or item based on a predefined set of criteria. They help ensure that activities and items are evaluated fairly and consistently.

You can create rubrics at the organization, department or course level. Rubrics are not automatically shared with all child org units below the org unit in which they were created in your organization's hierarchy. You must explicitly share them if you want them available to child org units. Rubrics created at the course level cannot be shared with other courses (you can create a rubric in a course template and reuse it in course offerings for that course template). If you don't want to share a rubric with all child org units, you can restrict who it is shared with on the New Rubric or Edit Rubric page.

If you are using Competencies to evaluate users, we recommend you set up rubrics before you set up your competencies, learning objectives, and activities since you cannot create an activity without associating it with a rubric and you cannot assess whether a user has completed a competency or learning objective without assessing the associated activities using the rubric.

There are two types of rubrics:

• Holistic Rubrics Single criteria rubrics (one-dimensional) used to assess participants' overall achievement on an activity or item based on predefined achievement levels.
• Analytic Rubrics Two-dimensional rubrics with levels of achievement as columns and assessment criteria as rows. Allows you to assess participants' achievements based on multiple criteria using a single rubric. You can assign different weights (value) to different criteria and include an overall achievement by totaling the criteria.

Use scenarios

• Your school district has a standard rubric for evaluating students' performance. The rubric assesses performance based on four criteria: Knowledge and Understanding; Critical Thinking; Communication; and Application of Knowledge. Students may achieve one of four levels for each criteria: Needs Remediation; Below Expectations; Meets Expectations; and Exceeds Expectations. The rubric clearly describes the characteristics of each level for each criterion.
• You want to encourage your course participants to review and comment on each others' ePortfolio items. You create an informal rubric that allows course participants to evaluate the overall quality of a portfolio item using the following achievement levels: This Needs Work; Good Start; Nice Example; and Showcase Worthy.

Access the Rubrics tool

Do one of the following:

• Click Rubrics on the navbar.
• Click Rubrics in the Admin Tools widget or from the Admin Tools menu on the minibar.
• Click Rubrics in the Course Administration widget.

Rubrics help topics

Teaching

• Creating a rubric
• Managing rubrics
• Viewing rubric statistics
• About Competencies
• About ePortfolio
• Allowing comments and rubric assessments on your content

Administering

• DOME variables - Rubrics
• Rubrics permissions