Crossing the Rubricon

By Kevin Pry, Associate Professor of English, Lebanon Valley College

When Julius Caesar took his legions across the Rubricon River into Italy and marched on Rome to change the old Republic forever, he knew there was no turning back--he was committed wholeheartedly to discarding an old set of assumptions and practices for new ones.  My experiences with assessment have put me into a situation that would have felt familiar to one of Caesar's veteran legionaries, for in the struggle to improve our assessment, I have had to push beyond my traditional understanding of how to use rubrics.  I have had to develop a methodology that has given new scope and effectiveness to the way I devise assignments, evaluate student work, and assess the results.  I jokingly call this change, "Crossing the Rubricon."

In the past, I used rubrics to grade major written or oral assignments, using them like checklists to determine whether or not students demonstrated their skill so that I could give specific feedback to them for the future. I was an old grading centurion following the old Roman regulations, more for discipline's sake than as an innovative tactician in the war on ignorance.  But I noticed that the use of conventional rubrics often seemed to penalize students in assignments where I was trying to promote risk-taking and creativity.  For example, in acting classes, there are some techniques and concepts that can only be learned by trying to employ them and failing at one's initial attempts to do them.

This led to Epiphany #1:  One can devise a rubric that puts a positive grade value on how useful a student's unsuccessful attempts at employing a technique was to promoting class discussions and student learning.

Of course, I had always reviewed the results of student learning, analyzing how they met/failed to meet criteria.  Before, I responded to their failures by trying new ways of teaching or discussing bewildering or confusing material.  I hadn't shifted the structure of my tried-and-true assignments because they worked for most students.  When I made the decision to cross the Rubricon and devise detailed rubrics for both large and small assignments, I discovered that the act of thinking in detail about how to use rubrics to generate evidence for course and program assessment led me to zero in on the instructions and prompts for each task, fine-tuning these to line them up with desired outcomes in a far more coherent and obvious manner.  This, naturally, is a major step in improving outcomes.

Thus, Epiphany #2:  Rubric writing is an artistically satisfying task, requiring you to analyze what you really want students to accomplish in an assignment.  Aligning prompts and instructions, criteria for evaluation, and desired outcomes produces important insights into where you should be focusing your energy and technique as a teacher.

With the push to "close the loop," I feared that the mechanics of having to assess multiple courses for multiple objectives might consume too much time and efforts.  But the insight that one detailed rubric can be made to assess multiple objectives in one cleverly designed assignment led to Epiphany #3:  That's what they meant by "work smarter, not harder."