Thinking about how rubrics are used in today’s classroom, I find that they are driven solely for statistical purposes to reflect a student’s growth on SAT based questioning and reasoning. This is usually demonstrated in student writing. Moreover, personal experience within the classroom has also provided a look into the way in which writing is addressed, as well as scored. However, while the rubric does reflect what specific levels of writing looks like, and how to achieve them, feedback is minimal.
There are two things about rubrics that are positive, one being that they provide an easy too understand scaling for the grade a student might receive. The other as a way to determine how a student might receive the highest mark possible on their work, by breaking down the requirements for each category. In addition, this allows for a quicker way for educators to grade, as the students are scored based on their directions followed, as well as how well they presented specific areas of the rubric. Moreover, by following a rubric, it is rather difficult for a student to fail or achieve a less than satisfactory mark on their writing. In fact, by following the specified directions within the rubric, the details of each category are laid out for the student so that they might chronologically tackle each requirement for the desired grade. Moreover, this provides an easier method for grading the educator. Through using a rubric, teachers are able to quickly grade a student’s work, based on the guidelines within the rubric.
Although there are numerous reasons to use a rubric, there is a major drawback that prevents it from being the perfect go to for grading work. Feedback is almost always left behind when using a rubric, as it helps to point out the reasons why the student received the mark they did. Moreover, it demonstrates the areas in which they need to improve in order to move their grades up to the next bracket. However, this is time consuming and at the end of the day tedious for most educators. The idea of a grading rubric is nice because it relieves the teacher of the additional work that piles on top of their current work load. Yet, as stated in Maja Wilson’s article, a rubric facilitates the response given to the student, similar to choosing a pre-made response from a selection menu. As with Maja Wilson, that also does not sit well with me as it strips any acknowledgment away from the student’s work, providing them with nothing but a mark and random circles on a page dictating their score. I look at rubrics as a way of neglecting the interaction between student and teacher, which threatens any engagement the student could have in their education.
Sheyland B. Young 