Rubrics & Comparative Judgment
CPD: Assessment for Teachers (by Dawn Cox), topic 3.1.2
Rubrics
Rubrics use a set of criteria that determine the quality of an assessment. It is usually presented as a matrix.
Rubrics
- The criteria used in the rubrics are based performance descriptors for the topic and are often ranked with justifiers, such as ‘satisfactory’, ‘good’, ‘outstanding’.
- A study by Lipnivech et al (2014) showed that use of detailed rubrics can improve student writing.
Advantages of rubrics
- They are quick to use with just ticks or highlighting.
- They are specific to a topic.
- If given before assessing, students can see the individual elements on which their assessment will be marked.
Disadvantages of rubrics
- May present ambiguous language, such as ‘some’, ’clear’, ’coherent’.
- It takes time to create them for each topic.
- Cannot be collated into an overall grade.
- Comparison between pupils is complex.
- Do not allow for alternative approaches to a task.
Comparative Judgment
Comparative judgment is when you juxtapose two pieces of work to compare which is better. It is a quick, holistic judgement without any use of criteria or rubric.
Advantages
- There are websites that use algorithms and do the analytics for you.
- Research shows it has a high level of reliability.
- It is effective for longer pieces of written work.
- It rank orders pupils’ work.
- It is more reliable than absolute judgments.
Disadvantages
- For validity, it needs a large amount of comparers.
- It does not give any specific feedback to students.
- It needs several pieces of the same work to be compared.
Test yourself on Rubrics & Comparative Judgment
What are the characteristics of comparative judgment?
Which of these is NOT true about comparative judgments?