Rubric Pro and Con

Pros

• Rubrics are powerful tools for assessment and instruction.
• They provide students with clear expectations for assignments, plus they give concrete details about how to obtain a particular score.
• Students may learn from rubrics in ways that they can't learn from a letter grade (such as teacher's expectations and standards of excellence).
• Rubrics define what quality entails.
• They are quick, objective, and efficient.
• Rubrics make justifying scores to parents or students much less tedious.
• The gradations on a rubric allow students to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
• Rubrics provide students with detailed feedback about an assignment.
• Students become more objective and thoughtful judges of their own quality of work and the quality of their classmate's work.
• A teacher is able to "stretch" a rubric to reflect the work of learning support students and the gifted students.
• If you must assign a grade letter to rubrics, it is easy to do if you have a gradation scale of 4-5. The highest score (4 or 5) score would equal an A.
• Rubrics provide teachers with benchmarks to incorporate in measuring and documenting student progress.
• Rubrics require teachers to clarify their focus, expectations, standards, and goals.
• Rubrics allow teachers to assess skills that may fall outside the traditional testing data field.
• When shared with students prior to an assignment, rubrics can be very motivational.

Cons

• Rubrics do require an initial investment of your time. But once they are completed, they are easily adaptable to various grade levels, subject areas, and specific assignments.
• Articulating the gradations of the rubric is sometime challenging. Some have recommended thinking of the words "yes", "yes - but", "no-but", and "no" to create your gradations.
• You may notice that your students ask for rubrics for all assignments. They like knowing what is expected and how to achieve high markings.