Dabo Li
This article hopes to convince you, the student or the professor, that essay grading rubrics — of the sort purposed toward illuminating why grades are what they are by aggregating hierarchical values — do not make a good substitution for traditional, written feedback.
This is not to dismiss these well-crafted rubrics as entirely useless. Rather, it is that, despite cosmetic functions, rubrics do not fill the void of substantive feedback. Such feedback is available only in the shape of complete sentences; tinkering with templates is inadequate as a means of criticism.
Merely scribbling on a rubric removes the personal touch essential to the relationship between the author and the reader. Grading papers, especially in the field of history and the social sciences, requires that the instructor makes an individual investment to read and engage with the student’s thesis. Assigning numerical values to a piece of argumentation creates the impression of having objectified, or even trivialized, one’s thinking. This is not to say that grades per se are ill representations of student work, but that, the process by which grades are settled should not be reduced to an arithmetic exercise. Analyzing a sporting contest typically entails a statistical summary to tell a story, but writing is not a contest. If the good or the bad stands out, why not spell it out in pen or type out the comments? Circling or shading numbers creates distance between the reader and the writer when the aim is to bridge it.
Rubrics are also inadequate insofar as they restrict the freedom and imagination with which ideas can be expressed. No two persons think identically on the same topic, however slight the margins of disagreement may be. In the marketplace of ideas, certain values and inclinations are necessarily good: an unorthodox way of approaching a problem, a dash of curiosity, an interdisciplinary approach, etc. Rubrics cannot micromanage or reflect these intangibles. When strictly executed, they alone rarely make allowances for originality. In fact, the best one can hope for is to mimic and fulfill some supposedly inerrant standards.
The most damning case against rubrics is that, being evasive rather than direct, they compromise the learning process. Although rubrics streamline the grading process and drop hints at areas of strength and weakness, they effectively act as the final word in an exchange of opinions. There is very little for the student to take away upon learning that she received “satisfactory” for “organization of paper” or “good” for “use of sources.” These vague, elastic and incomprehensible distinctions are better substituted with active, thoughtful and substantive engagement with the thesis the paper erects.
Although handwritten feedback is superior to stand-alone, marked rubrics, this does not mean that providing online feedback is always disingenuous. Whether in soft or hard copy, the bottom line is that students are entitled to receive back their papers with evidence of reading and editing, not mere marked rubrics.