In 2020, I, like every other teacher on the planet, saw my entire teaching schedule get thrown online. Suddenly everyone had to be fluent in at least sixteen different online teaching platforms1 as well as communication tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. It, well, in no uncertain terms, it sucked. Students and teachers alike had no connection to each other, no real way of making sure anything was being learned, and, most importantly, no idea if things would ever go back to normal. But you know all that.
What you might not know is just how half-baked these teaching tools were even before the pandemic. Online teaching and its adjacent tools have always been a mildly skirted no-man’s-land in the halls of education. Teachers don’t like them, administrators love them, students can go either way depending on year, subject, and how much online class they’ve already had to suffer through. I was lucky enough to be saddled with Google Classroom for some of my classes, which is a little bit like having a luxury stateroom on the Titanic—it's great right up until it isn't.
Google Classroom had been around for a while at that point. Its stated purpose for being was to act as a bridge between students and teachers and to make it easy to share files. It served its purpose well for six years and then suddenly got drafted into being the main form of contact between teacher and X number of individual students all safely snugged away in their own houses. It didn’t take long for all the flaws to begin to show. Google, to their credit2, rushed to add features and correct nuisances and mainly did a good job.
The most significant change that Google made was to allow rubrics to be added to a given assignment. And, on the one hand, thank God. On the other, oh God. Because rubrics are the double-edged sword of the education world. Used well, they can help learners assess and refine their own work, but, used poorly, they become an arcane labyrinth of rules and compliances that stifle creativity and encourage conformity.
So, let's start where we always do: what are rubrics and where did they come from?
From Merriam-Webster:
a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests
Of course, that's only the fourth sense of the word. Prior to that, we get definitions for rubric that identify it as a rule, a title, or a category heading. So what strange, little, trip did rubric take to evolve from a simple synonym for rule into a scoring guide?
Etymonline gives us the breakdown:
c. 1300, robryk, ribrusch, rubryke, "directions in a liturgical book for participation in religious services" (which often were written in red ink), from Old French rubrique, rubriche "rubric, title" (13c.) and directly from Latin rubrica "red ochre, red coloring matter," from ruber (from PIE root *reudh- "red, ruddy").
Only that doesn't quite give the full story. As mass education became the norm, professional researchers began looking for ways to improve upon the traditional lecture-and-memorize methods of instruction. To that end, they borrowed rubric as an umbrella term to denote a system of guidelines rather than just a single rule. By doing so, they created a meaning that is both somehow less inflexible than rule but also more formal and thus stricter. It leaves rubric in a strange place as both a tool and a metaphor.
As a tool, rubrics are a solid addition to any curriculum. In my writing classes, for example, the students have full access to the grading rubric. They can use it as a checklist to see if their work has all the features I'm looking for; they can use it as a peer-evaluation tool to help their classmates create better (and therefore higher scoring) papers. And, when I use it to score their papers, they can see exactly where I'm marking them down.
The flip side, of course, is that writing rubrics is one of the single most difficult parts of my job. A good rubric is clear and leaves little room for interpretation and doubt, yet it can't be just a mere checklist. It needs to be an evaluation, it needs to show just where and how a student's work could and should be improved. And yet, although it pains me to say it, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. Sometimes, often in fact, I craft a rubric I think is airtight and bulletproof only to have to revise it the second the students get their eyes on it.
Truthfully, this is as it should be. Because the dirty little secret about rubrics is that it shouldn’t be the teachers making them. If students are to be assessed on what they have learned in a given class, they should be the ones to create the assessment tool. This is the only possible way to ensure that learners are equal participants in their own edification education.
Where does that leave us? With a red pen and a set of ideas. And that is the real use of a rubric, I think. Having a rubric, even one that needs to be revised and redone over and over again, relieves the red pen of its authority to denote absolute right and absolute wrong. Instead, it allows for nuance, interpretation, and a broader set of lenses from which we can view the whole. And that is something we could all use a little more of.
I may be exaggerating. May.
Not that things are perfect yet: I still can't assign any grade that isn't a numerical value, I still can't assign grades to multiple students at once, and I still can't easily navigate from viewing a single student's work back to the full class' work. But most egregious is that in 2025, I still can't see the student view of a given class. Which means half the time, I have to ask a student to show me what the assignment looks like on their computer so I can properly explain what the students need to do. But I digress.