Purpose:

In order to provide information that will better assist you in monitoring your child’s work product, we have assembled the following information. In these documents, you will find an explanation and example of the rubrics (guidelines) that are used to assess your child’s work product at SGMS. As well, examples of most general types of assignment are included in the hyperlinks below. By comparing your child’s work with the exemplars provided, you will have another tool to guide your student in his/her academic success.

Rubrics:

Perhaps you’ve watched competitions in which performances are given scores on a tenpoint rating scale. How does a judge arrive at a score? What makes one performance a “9” and another a “10”? In education, we must also rate student work. Rubrics are a tool for grading work that describes expectations clearly; rubrics describe what is evident in an “8” assignment and what was missing that would have led to a “10”. A rubric provides a way for the teacher to give feedback about the quality of work by assigning point values to requirements and to the quality with which the requirements were displayed. Rubrics let students and teachers have a clear idea of what students should be able to know and do in order to demonstrate learning.

Rubrics are often given in the form of a checklist or a table. Most rubrics have more than one category being graded, such as accuracy of answer and grammar. Each category being graded will receive a score based on how well the category was addressed according to the given guidelines. The scores for each category are then added together to arrive at the points received out of the total points possible. Most rubrics reserve the highest scores in each category for advanced work such as excellent academic vocabulary (such as “multiply” rather than “times it”) or additional examples beyond the minimum required. A rubric emphasizes the expectations of content and quality work that demonstrate a student’s knowledge.