Grading Rubrics
Goals and objectives are measured by a performance assessment in the courses required for the Philosophy major. Specifically, student performance in writing essays, and essay exam questions, will be measured using the follwing standardized grading rubrics.
Essays and essay questions are evaluated with an eye both to the student’s mastery of the specific subject matter covered by the course, and to the student’s mastery of more general skills in philosophical thinking and writing. A higher standard of thinking and writing is required for upper-division than for lower-division courses. In logic courses, students’ competence in formal logic is evaluated through assessment of their performance in weekly problem sets and examinations.
On this page:
Why use rubrics?
Rubrics provide a readily accessible way of communicating and developing our goals with students and the criteria we use to discern how well students have reached them.
Our department uses two rubrics, displayed on the two charts below:
- Grading Rubric for Writing Assignments
- Grading Rubric for Essay and Short Answer Exam Questions, Quizzes, and Homework Assignments
What is a rubric?
Rubrics (or scoring tools) are a way of describing evaluation criteria or grading standards based on the expected outcomes and performances of students. Each rubric consists of a set of scoring criteria and point values associated with these criteria.
In most rubrics the criteria are grouped into categories so the instructor and the student can discriminate among the categories by level of performance. In classroom use, the rubric provides a concrete standard against which student performance may be compared.
Assessment Purposes
- To improve the reliability of scoring written assignments and oral presentations.
- To convey goals and performance expectations of students in an unambiguous way.
- To convey grading standards or point values and relate them to performance goals.
- To engage students in critical evaluation of their own performance.