Create Rubrics

Introduction

Rubrics can be powerful tools for increasing grading efficiency, improving students’ understanding of expectations, and monitoring performance. This page includes resources to help you learn more about using rubrics for assessment in Canvas.

On This Page:

  1. Recommendations for rubric design
  2. Create and manage rubrics in your course
  3. Attach a rubric to an assignment, quiz, or discussion
  4. Create and use outcomes

 

Recommendations for rubric design

Rubrics can be time-consuming to construct, challenging to write, and sometimes hard to use effectively. Use the best practices below to help you create quality rubrics:

  • Use parallel language, making sure that the language from column to column is similar
  • Use student friendly language
  • Be as descriptive as possible
  • Make sure the descriptions are "equally" weighted between levels
  • Describe the performance in positive, not negative language
  • Don't use too many columns

Review excellent lists of tools and resources for designing effective rubrics from Penn State’s Dutton Institute and Penn State's Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence:

 

Create and manage rubrics in your course

Follow the steps in the text or video tutorial to create a rubric in your course:

 

Rubrics Overview video, 4m 27s

 

Read this tutorial to learn how to view and manage your rubrics:

 

Attach a rubric to an assignment, quiz, or discussion

Now that you have created a rubric, attach it to an assessment of your choice using any of the following tutorials as a guide:

 

Create and use outcomes

Outcomes are a tool within Canvas that allows faculty to track students' progress as measured by pedagogical goals or desired outcomes. Rubrics are used to help students understand expectations for an assignment and how their submissions will be graded. Outcomes can be aligned with a rubric for additional assessment and measurable performance, usually at the institutional level.

Follow the steps in this tutorial to practice creating outcomes in your Canvas sandbox:

There are four different calculation methods that you can choose from when you are creating Outcomes. Read the document below to decide which method you should use. Scroll down to the Calculation Methods section for more information:

You can view the progress of individual students on each aligned assessment or activity. Use this document to learn how to view all aligned items within an Outcome: