The Rubric: An Assessment Tool to Guide Students and Markers

The changing environment for both students and lecturers dictates the requirement for giving feedback on assessment activities rapidly. In order to close this cycle of learning for the student and facilitate the feed-forward process, the development of rubrics has become an essential part of the workload. The rubric tool needs to have clearly stated performance indicators and criteria so that both student and lecturer have the same expectations of the assessment activity. The rubric must be robust enough to be able to capture the balance of being both an easy tool for marking but also detailed enough to give constructive feedback reflecting the learning outcomes. The rubric development, given its complexity, when constructing this tool, can be time consuming but eventually becomes time saving. Thereby reducing the grading workload effort of the lecturer while maintaining the knowledge gained by the students through the assessment activity.