The material goal of a grading rubric is to assign different features of an assignment — an essay, e.g. — a certain number of points. Formatting is worth 10 points. Grammar and punctuation is another 10 points. The thesis is given 5 points. Citing three secondary sources is given 20 points. How many points do I have left? 55? Another 15 to the claims that support the thesis. 10 for clarity. 20 for addressing issues discussed in class. And a last 10 points for figures of speech. When grading the paper, points are taken away or added to whichever part of the rubric something in the essay seems to fit. A good thesis means 5 points into the thesis bucket. A solecism means some points are withheld in the Grammar and Punctuation set. Citing three secondary sources is awarded with 20 points, and so on.
As far as a system for organizing one’s grading, this seems to work just fine. But at least in the minds of some, a rubric also serves to ground what would otherwise be purely subjective. With every point lost, or every point gained, we feel that there must be some requirement which has a definite numerical value, and the grade accounts for this requirement being absent (3 points off for failing to cite a secondary source) or present (2 points added for a supporting claim).
This objectivity serves at least two goals. This objectivity streamlines, it would seem, the process whereby a grade is disputed by a student. You can see right here that you lost 5 points for clarity and another 3 for secondary sources, and that’s where the grade of 92 comes about.
Another goal, for which I have a great deal of sympathy, is to settle the question of justice (at least, a part of that not-exactly-small question) in the matter of assignments and their just deserts. Arbitrariness is poison, especially when committed by the instructor. A grade which cannot be explained except to say there was a misty sort of “I just didn’t feel it was good,” breeds confusion and paralysis. How is the student to write anything when it’s the whim of the instructor which determines the outcome?
Let’s grant for the time being that grading on the ‘A to F’ alpha-numeric scale is a good and meet way to signify something true about the quality of the student’s work.1 Let’s even grant that there is something mathematically real about good writing.2
We want to enjoy a rich atmosphere of trust between instructor and student, with the shadows of the arbitrary and the emotionally unreliable banished therefrom. Objectivity seems to recommend itself highly.
If we do wish for objectivity, however, does the rubric meet the bill?
Say we are deciding upon the values for each part of a paper. Let’s go to grammar and syntax and punctuation. What value should we set to that? 10 points, says instructor in the back. Ten points it is. Let’s dig a bit deeper. What’s the value of a sentence fragment, the value of a split infinitive, and the value of a preposition put at the end of a sentence? Should they be the same? Why? It seems a sentence fragment is a greater violation than a split infinite, which is sometimes barbaric and sometimes anti-barbaric, and is infinitely worse than a preposition at the end of a sentence, since a terminal preposition is perfectly fine English.3 There are many other grammatical infractions we could assign some value to. In any case, why should they all earn the same penalty? And what about repeated cases of the same error? If we find five sentence fragments, do we simply add up them all up, or is there something to the repetition itself that deserves consideration?
The same sort of question can be asked of the other sets in your run-of-the-mill rubric. How much is the value of a citation, it just misses the year, or a citation and it fails to mention the author, or a citation and it has everything but the title is not italicized? There is a near-endless series of errors, and in most cases, one seems more blameworthy than another.
The point is that, if numerical objectivity is the goal of rubric, no rubric seems to maintain objectivity unless it has completed this process. After all, if a sentence fragment and a split infinitive receive the same demerit of, say, two points — why? Did this decision rest on the whim of the instructor?
And yet, an instructor committed wholeheartedly to objective grading by means of a rubric will find his work has only begun when he has completed the ponderous list of these sub-infractions.
After such a mighty work is complete, he must now consider these questions: say there is a sentence fragment. I’ve already evaluated those, and found that a sent.frag. is worth 1.38 points.4 But say the sentence thus fragmented is no ancillary or supplementing sentence. The fractured sentence is the thesis itself. Would it not seem more blameworthy to fail in constructing the grounding sentence of the whole work than to have fragmented some sentence whose role in the essay is marginal at most? The thesis statement deserves greater attention, more time given to revision, extra contemplation than other sentences, no? So if the thesis sentence is written, but as a fragment, does this not deserve something special, since the student failed to give his attention to the place most deserving of his attention? Some attention was made; the sentence is there. But it is a fragment all the same. Does this situation itself (a combination of sentence fragmentation and thesis writing) deserve its own kind of demerit?
At the introduction of these sorts of combinatory situations, perhaps the already weary instructor breaks out in a cold sweat. But on he perseveres, finding hidden patterns and beholding a beautiful web of interdependences.
Perhaps he is working dutifully through two-fold combinations for some time before he stumbles upon a situation where two, then three, then four infractions combine before him. But what if the dangling modifier appears in combination with a double space between two words whilst a citation is mentioned, without comma, and the italics doesn’t catch the entire word? Must there not be some evaluation warranted to this particular combination of infractions, committed at this point in the essay?
This is the moment of vertigo and despair. His swivelly chair begins to do its thing. Hurricaine winds peel off the ceiling. The sun has gone. The stars shine red and orange, and like enflamed serpents fall upon his head. Or is he himself shooting heaven-ward? His stomach and his heart have found new homes in his left and right foot respectively. Darkness grins down. He opens a new tab on his computer and types out: claude dot ai.
Objectivity, if it wants justification by explicitly calculating every number for every situation, it will end up beyond the ken of any mortal instructor. Objectivity — or to speak more normally, to grade carefully — is to work out something akin to a differential equation with variables in the thousands and the matrices as big as a plush, king-sized throw. All rubrics I have seen, by contrast, are based upon the simple addition of a small set of unrelated variables.
Rubrics are not objective; they simply claim objectivity at some arbitrary level of depth.
Footnotes
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A disputable claim, for all its purchase at every level of education nowadays. Holding to this claim will haunt all that follows in the likeness of an absolutely enormous, question-begging cryptid. ↩
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Another claim on whose bones I cannot apply flesh here and now. Something to chew on, all the same: quality cannot be reduced to quantity, but neither can quantity be dissolved into a mere myth of what is actually just quality. Quantity is a true expression of something deeper where both quality and quantity are found to be One. For our creaturely, sublunar existence, quantity and quality exist. All good things have a quantity of one. ↩
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Contra the Ciceronians, prepositions are recognized in both germanic and other PIE languages as at least quasi-adverbs. Being more of an Erasmian myself (latinā tenus saltem), I realize this may invite the furor of some. ↩
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This instructor is indeed becoming wise, for he has discovered that the relative value of some error demands working with rational numbers; though why he has chosen the decimal system and not list it as 1 & 19/50 tells us he has still some way to go toward Nirvana. ↩