There’s a big new feature in your Populi courses today: Rubrics!

Rubrics are standard guides for evaluating and grading assignments. They contain evaluative criteria and scoring levels the instructor uses to rate student coursework. You can use them to grade most types of assignments, as well as incorporate them into your grading of peer review files/essays and graded discussions.

Here’s a look at what they do and how they work...

The basics

Rubrics exist at two levels. Global rubrics are set up in Academics > Settings and are available for use in any course at your school. Course rubrics are set up by faculty for use in their own courses. Rubrics and criteria can be duplicated and modified to fit your school’s needs in any number of ways.

Criteria are the meat-and-potatoes of rubrics. Each criterion contains multiple evaluative levels that let you score the student’s performance in that area. For example, you might have a criterion for “Writing Style” that has four levels—Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor—each of which is worth a certain percentage of the assignment points the criterion covers.

Rubrics can contain as many criteria as you see fit; each criterion is worth a portion of the total rubric score. Say you had a “Research Paper” rubric with criteria for Writing Style, Citations, and Formatting: you might weight the Style criterion 80% and the other two 10% each.

Using a rubric

Rubrics can be attached to assignments, peer review files and essays, and graded discussions.

When it’s time to grade the assignment, you click the rubric symbol and score the student’s work. You can even let students use rubrics when scoring one another’s submissions in peer review assignments. The rubric scores feed directly into the assignment grade; for peer review and discussions, they’re factored in to the overall grade calculation you’ve set up for those assignments.

When students view their grades, they’ll see how they fared according to the rubric.

Learn more

We’re excited to get rubrics out to our users (just in time for the new school year for many of you!). Together with the new course navigation layout, they’re helping set the stage for even more improvements to Populi courses.

Read more about rubrics in the Populi Knowledge Base.