The essay rubric is an important tool of evaluating students’ essays in accordance to specific standards.
It not only helps the student to assess his writing skills in a fair and universal manner but also enables peer and self assessment.
The rubric is a significant method of judging your own essay in terms of failure and achievement as one can compare his own essay with the requirements provided in the rubric.
Harvard Graduate School of Education Project Zero Rubrics and Self Assessment Project site provides a rubric for the persuasive essay by Heidi Goodrich Andrade.
The rubric weighs the essays in the scale of 1 to 4 in accordance to eight different criteria for assessment.
The points of assessments in the order of their relevance being: the claim, reasons in support of the claim, reasons against the claim, organization, voice, tone, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions (http://www.
pz.
harvard.
edu/Research/RubricsSelfPE.
htm).
This rubric gives the student a clear idea of a persuasive essay.
Though you may find making a rubric a time consuming and tedious exercise, but it will pay you back at the time of assessing the essay.
The task would then be a lot easier and quicker with the help of this tool.
To know how the rubric helps in assessment you can refer to Melissa Kelly’s write-up on how the rubric makes her work easier and quicker (Kelly, Melissa- Make Your Life Easier with Rubrics at www.
About.
com).
The links providing the examples of rubrics gives a clear understanding of how to use a rubric for assessing an essay.
As one goes through these sample rubrics, one realizes that the opening sentences, structure, and the thesis of an essay are of crucial importance.
For a student this will make the work of writing an essay easier as he is now on familiar of what he needs to do to get those elusive grades for his essay.
On one hand there is Catholicforum.
com which has samples of rubrics which helps students to analyze their essays; while on the other hand there is Prep.
com which has the SAT rubric sample.
In the SAT rubric, the essays are scaled from 1 to 6 based on the criteria listed in the rubric.
These include development of position, organization, and use of language, sentence structure, and grammar and word usage.
Then there is also Studyguide.
org, which grades the students’ essays in place of giving the essays points and assessment is done on the basis of the format, understanding of text, development of the idea, text support, organization, word choice, sentence structure, transitions, and language and mechanics.
Making use of the essay rubric is expedient not only for students but is also helpful for teachers.
Before creating your own rubric one can always go through the above given sites available.
The rubric not only makes assessment easier and quicker, but also gives the student an idea of the assignment requirements and the teacher’s expectations.
You choose font face
FREE Citations
