Working with rubrics: codification plus dialogue in developing shared academic standards

Historical attempts to improve transparency in higher education assessment include the development of explicit assessment criteria and rubrics. In this chapter, we focus on developing and using rubrics within the assessment strategy and practice of a taught degree programme. A rubric is a framework using clear and concise language to support assessment of student work and includes three key features: evaluative criteria; quality definitions for those criteria at different grades; and an agreed approach to scoring. Research suggests that effective use of well-designed rubrics is popular with students and academics, enhances assessment transparency, and has instructional leverage. However, we identify four key limitations in using rubrics: (i) their differential interpretation by individual staff and students; (ii) the difficulty of judging complex, open-ended assessment tasks; (iii) heightened transparency promoting reductionist guidance; and (iv) codification constraining liberatory learning. We argue that developing and refining the design and implementation of rubrics within a taught programme, if it includes authentic dialogue, is a potentially powerful lever for developing shared understanding of academic standards. Rubric development and application should also be underpinned by ways of knowing within the subject discipline of the taught programme, combined with a level of assessment literacy. The chapter proposes that a university should adopt a distributed leadership approach to developing and implementing rubrics as just one part of a strategic focus on academic standards.