Use the Rubrics tool to create rubrics easily and efficiently within a course. You can associate rubrics with assessments and grade items; and during assessment, rubrics can standardize the evaluation of learner work and facilitate the ability to provide feedback.
Requirements
The following are required to use the Rubrics tool:
- To see and use the Rubrics tool, you must have the required Rubrics permissions applied to your role. These permissions can only be accessed by your organization administrator.
- To add the Rubrics tool to your course navbar, you must have the required Navbar permissions applied to your role. For more information about how to add a tool or link to your course navbar, refer to the Customize your course navbar topic.
Important: You can also locate available course tools by navigating to Course Admin from your navbar. If you cannot find the Rubrics tool in your Brightspace instance, contact your organization administrator to obtain required permissions.
Visual tour of the Rubrics tool
Figure: Tour of the Rubrics interface.
- New Rubric: Create a new rubric for a course.
- Actions: Perform any of the following actions by selecting them from the drop-down menu.
- Edit Options: Edit an existing rubric.
- Preview: See how a rubric appears to learners.
- Set Status: Set a rubric's status as Draft, Published, or Archived.
- Draft: A rubric that is being created or in progress.
- Published: A rubric that is visible to learners in your course.
- Archived: A rubric that is no longer visible but saved in Brightspace for you to view.
- View Statistics: View the statistics for your rubric. This includes activities related to submissions, associated competencies, and ePortfolio.
- Copy: Create a copy of a rubric.
- Delete: Remove a rubric from Brightspace.
- Description: Lists the description for each rubric, if applicable.
- Type: The type of rubric. For example, rubrics can be Analytic or Holistic.
- Scoring Method: How a rubric is graded. The method can be No Score, Points, or Custom Points.
- Status: Indicates the status of the rubric.
Notes:
- To edit the Description, Type, and Scoring Method for a rubric, click Actions > Edit Options.
- To edit the Status for a rubric, click Actions > Set Status.
About Rubric status options
Draft: The initial status of a rubric. Draft rubrics are not yet available for new associations.
Published: Associations can be made with published rubrics. Once a rubric has an association, you cannot change the rubric's name, description, levels, and criteria.
Archived: Archived rubrics do not appear in default search results and are not available for new associations. Existing associations with archived rubrics remain associated with activities that were previously created but they cannot be evaluated or updated. Learners continue to see learner-visible rubric evaluations on archived rubrics and their scores in activity summary, user progress, and Grades. Learners do not see the Archived state tag, however, they can see evaluations and feedback provided using an archived status rubric.
Note: Users with permission to change a rubric's status can do so at any time. If you change the status of a rubric to Archived, there are no effects on the alignment of rubrics to any assessment activities or previous evaluations that were completed using the rubric. Rubrics that are changed to an Archived status after the initial alignment to the activity continue to display and can be used for evaluation. The Archived tag that appears on rubric tiles in the activity creation and activity evaluation workflows provide information to instructors and course developers that a rubric previously aligned to an activity is now archived, and that it is not possible to add archived rubrics to assessment activities and new rubric alignments.
About Rubric types
Analytic: 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. With analytic rubrics, levels of achievement display in columns and your assessment criteria display in rows. Analytic rubrics may use a points, custom points, or text only scoring method. Points and custom points analytic rubrics may use both text and points to assess performance; with custom points, each criterion may be worth a different number of points. For both points and custom points, an Overall Score is provided based on the total number of points achieved. The Overall Score determines if learners meet the criteria determined by instructors. You can manually override the Total and the Overall Score of the rubric.
Holistic: Single criterion rubrics (one-dimensional) used to assess learners' overall achievement on an activity or item based on predefined achievement levels. Holistic rubrics may use a percentage or text only scoring method.
Scoring: Used to assess rubrics with textual performance levels such as Excellent, or with text and numeric score such as Excellent (90 points). There are several ways to score a rubric:
- No Score: Performance levels indicated by text. For example, three performance levels for a rubric can be Poor, Good, and Excellent.
- Points: This scoring method is only available to analytic rubrics. Performance levels are indicated by points. For example, three performance levels for a rubric can be Poor (0 points), Good (75 points), and Excellent (125 points).
- Custom Points: This scoring method is only available to analytic rubrics. The Custom Points scoring method is similar to the Points scoring method, but you can customize the points given for each criterion. For example, if performance levels are Poor, Good, and Excellent, then the criterion Spelling and Grammar can be worth 0 points, 10 points, and 20 points for each level, and the criterion Expression can be worth 0 points, 30 points, and 60 points, making it worth three times the points of Spelling and Grammar.
- Percentages: This scoring method is only available to holistic rubrics. A holistic rubric using Percentages can be automatically assessed based on the score of its associated item, for example, a Grade item.