When students are assigned literary essays that highly focus on the writing quality and prominence of textual facts a rubric should be organized. In that rubric it should be discussed in detail how the student should approach the written work and what is expected from them. To make the whole process seem serious a point value or grading system is usually attached, to observe how well the student managed to meet the demands.
A grading rubric should be designed with a lot of care. Its importance in the field of education and official works is immense. Grading education-related matters like literary essays, various assignments and projects and even textual answers, are often considered debatable. Creating a grading rubric makes it easier to grade and in return further improves the approach of students toward their work by providing them with truthful and factual feedback. It's not just about forcing demands on someone, rather it needs to be created with extreme care and taking care of every point and fact that might be necessary to include in the essay.
A grading rubric contains things like criteria, levels of performance, scores, and descriptors that become crucial when assessing a work. Criteria deals with recognizing a certain feature or points that require definitions of their own and examples as well. Levels of performance determine how good the quality of the work was. These levels give students honest remarks about their work and help them improve their skills further. A score or grade makes the student realize in what fields they are lacking. Good scores or grades may help them get motivated to work better next time. Descriptors are explicit remarks on the performance that helps to show how the score has been derived.
Types of Rubrics usually depend on the requirement of the work and its evaluation. There are several types of rubric, they are hereby given below −
In this type of rubric all the criteria are evaluated under a single grade or score. It is useful to grade any performance on its overall basis but the weakness of this type of rubric is that it cannot give detailed analysis to a student.
This type of rubric is exactly opposite to a Holistic rubric as it provides detailed analysis to the student. This kind of rubric gives separate scores for separate criteria.
A generic rubric focuses on a set of criteria that can be similar to a lot of other tasks. Thus criteria are evaluated separately in the case of a generic rubric.
This type of rubric is only applicable to specific tasks, or unique criteria. They are evaluated separately, although proper evaluation is not always maintained in this type of rubric.
Before creating a grading rubric for a literary essay it is important to set a goal of what to include and what not to. The quality of the grading rubric highly depends on the demands and the approach one is expecting from the literary essay. One can ask themselves questions about what kind of feedback to give, how to point out the expectations for the literary essay, if all the tasks related to the essay are equally important, and even how the said person wants to evaluate the literary essay.
The second step in the process of creating a Grading Rubric is choosing what type of grading rubric it is going to be. It will help to create a set standard for the grading rubric. There are four kinds of rubrics as discussed earlier; they are Holistic, Analytical, Generic and Task-specific.
This step is crucial for making the student understand what points are necessary to include with the objective of learning the said subject. One has to implement all of their knowledge and understanding of the said subject in the grading rubric in the form of criteria. Grouping these sets of criteria depending on their similarities is necessary and it is very important not to include anything critical. A grading rubric should not be filled with too many criteria as it may confuse the student and hamper the quality of the literary essay. Four to seven particular subjects are enough to create the required criteria. This step helps drastically while evaluating the literary essay as it will become easier to spot the specific criteria with a lack of information and advise the student on it accordingly.
Once it has been decided on what particular fields the student needs to focus on, it's time for figuring out how to organise the grading system. Normally rating of any work or literary essay is done in terms of 3-5 levels. Using terms like exceptional or satisfactory is normal, though in the case of a grading rubric grades like A, B, C, D, etc., are used. Organizing them in an ascending or descending order is necessary to make them easy to understand.
The most difficult part in the process of setting up a grading rubric is the creation of a descriptor. A descriptor is writing down the expectations under every performance level for every designated criterion. The statements should be up to the point and easy to understand.
A thorough revision needs to be done to see if the whole thing has not been too much convoluted with requirements. After all, it is a process to improve the skills of the students, and not the teachers or professors to show off their talent.
Grading rubrics are great educational tools for both the teachers and the students. The students can improve their skills, by following the said expectations and demands of the teacher. The teacher on the other hand can improve their skills by communicating more with the students through this unique method and also clearing their own perspective on what they want from the students. There are quite a few steps that need to be followed with proper care to create a great grading rubric. This process also improves the quality of the literary essay.
Q1. How many types of Grading Rubric are there?
Ans. There are 4 different kinds of grading rubrics. They are Holistic, Analytical, Generic and Task-specific. All these rubrics have their unique purposes.
Q2. What is the major weakness of a holistic Rubric?
Ans. A holistic rubric evaluates all the criteria under one grading system. Thus its major weakness is that it cannot give detailed analysis to a student.
Q3. What is the most important point to include in a grading rubric for a literary essay?
Ans. A literary essay should be factually correct and precise. Thus, one of the major criteria to include in the rubric is to instruct the student to check the facts.
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