Rubrics are a systematic way of grading assignments. They can be holistic or analytical in nature.

A holistic rubric looks at the overall assignment and provides one over-arching criterion with various levels of performance. For example, a paper can be jduge on overall writing by making the categories of excellent, good, average, and poor. Each of these ratings comes with a brief paragraph that describes the level of performance. This is a way to provide some feedback with having to spend a large amount of time marking.

An analytical rubric breaks the assignment done into components and provides a rating for each component. For a research paper a teacher might include the components of grammar, formatting, word count, etc. and each of these components would have a score attached to it.

In this post, we are going to develop an analytical rubric for an assignment in Moodle. The only activity that allows for rubrics is “assignments” so we will make a rubric for this activity.

Making a Rubric

1. After logging into Moodle, in your course, click “turn editing on”
2. Next, in one of the sections of the course click “add activity”
3. Select “assignment”
4. The setting page for the assignment appears. There is a lot of information here but focus on the following
   • Give your assignment a name (THIS IS REQUIRED BY MOODLE)
   • Give your assignment a description (THIS IS REQUIRED BY MOODLE)

Below is a picture of step 4

5. Scroll down to the “grades” tab

6. Set maximum number of points to “30”

7. Change the grading method to “rubric” and leave the rest of the settings the same

Below is a picture of steps 5-7

8. Click “save and display” and you will see the following.

9.  Click on “define new grading form from scratch” The other option only works if there are existing rubrics.

10. In the next screen, you need to complete the following

• Give the rubric a name
• Create three criterion by clicking on “add criterion” two times
• Add one levels to each criterion by clicking on “add level”. You should have four levels for each criterion
• Below is a picture of the rubric I developed

As you can see, rubric is highly flexible. Each level can be worth a different number of points ad you can have a different number of levels for each criterion. The only rule is to make sure that the total points for the rubric are the same as those you set in the points option in assignment settings.

11. Once finished, click”save rubric and make it ready” You should see the following

We can now use our rubric and I will demonstrate this with an example student. You may not be able to follow along if your course does not have any students.

1. I click on “view/grade all submissions”
2. Next, I see the assignment and the students in the class. To grade the student I click on “edit” and select “grade”. Below is a picture

3. I can now pick the score  I want to give. Provide comments for each criteria and provide overall comments in the “Feedback” section. Below are pictures of the rubric and feedback.

4. Now, I click “save changes” On the next screen I click “continue”You should now see the grade page again with the score and feedback you provided. Below is a visual of this

Conclusion

This post provided step-by-step instruction on using rubrics in Moodle. Rubrics provide quick feedback to a student in terms of there performance on specific action-based task.