The concepts of reliability and validity is important when you grade papers. Your students need to know what to expect from a writing assignment. The advantage to using a writing rubric is that the rubric clearly spells out what the expectations of the assignments are and the skills needed to get a good grade.
Then when you grade the paper, you simply go back to the criteria listed in the rubric and comment on how the student either fulfilled those expectations well and describe why the students did well on a certain skill in the rubric, and conversely, if a student did not do well on a specific skill in the rubric, you can then describe in your comments what the student did wrong and how to fix it for next time.
Another advantage to using a writing rubric is that a rubric provides consistency across different teachers and different English classes. When you have consistency in how a paper is graded, then you have more reliability as different raters would assess papers as consistently as possible with each other.
Actually, the procedure for holistic grading using rubrics was first developed by the Educational Testing Service for use in national large scale testing. Using rubrics across different teachers adds to the reliability of the score and makes sure when one teacher grades a paper a B, then another teacher would also see that same paper as a B.
When I was working for ETS as a TOEFL Writing rater, we would grade each TOEFL essay holistically with a score of 4 being the best and 1 being the worse. Each level had criteria that students had to fulfill in his writing based on a holistic writing rubric. In order to increase reliability, we were all trained to grade in the same way as much as possible. We would all grade the same paper using the same rubric, and then ETS would average those grades together to produce an aggregate grade to represent a consistent score across different teachers.
When I was teaching for California State University at Northridge, we would grade all the incoming Freshman Composition Entrance Exam essays together based on a holistic rubric with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best. If 4 out of 5 of us graded an essay a 3, then the essay would get a 3. For CSUN, majority ruled.
Using a writing rubric helps teachers grade consistently. It also helps students know what the expectations of the assignment is. It helps teachers be able to give accurate feedback by commenting on how the student should improve on each criteria he did wrong or compliment the student on each criteria/skill he did write. As a result, having a rubric cuts down on student complaints on a bad grade since the rubric clearly spells out why a student got that bad grade. It is advantageous to use rubrics in the online and the face to face classroom.
What kind of rubrics do you use in your class? Do you use holistic rubrics or analytic (more detailed) rubrics in your class?
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