moorepants
commented
6 years ago @nav-go @clayfanatic @swkresie
I've been thinking about changing the rubrics to 60 pts from 100 but I no longer think it is a good idea. The main reason is it screws up what I've written about and the progress now becomes 17% of the grade instead of 10%. Secondly, it doesn't give a 0-100 scale on the grade. And lastly, if only one team was confused by the progress 10 pts last year, I'm not sure that's a good reason to change it.
I'm open to suggestions on changing the rubric designs wrt to the goals above. I may have missed some goals and we may need to adjust some of the goals. So feel free to comment there too. As it stands, the Canvas system doesn't let me make exactly the rubric I want, but I think it is as close as we can get.
clayfanatic
Rubric goals
Provide students with concrete/clear explanations of what they are expected to include.
Ensure that grading is consistent among many graders.
Ensure that the grade for each assignment is on a 100 pt scale and that the distribution of grades has a spread around a mean of about 80. The +3sigma should be at 100 and -3sigma at 60 (occasionally there may be a grade in the 50-60 range). This will ensure clear numerical feedback to the students and reduce the likelihood that curving the final grade is needed. It is also better to have to curve up a bit than down.
Interpretation of the rubrics by the graders should be simple, simple numbers, simple scales, simple wording.
The rubrics should give feedback on the particular assignment, e.g. "The group can develop a well designed memo." But a student can collect thorough data and present beautifully, but miss the point and the data that the memo is based on is in the wrong direction or flawed. In this case, we also need a way to give feedback to the group that tells them that they are not on a good design track. Another example may be that they present a design perfectly, but the design is just a bad design. We may be able to design rubrics that produce a grade that reflects both getting the presentation of the work correct and simultaneously grades whether the work is good or poor, but I haven't had success with that so far and am not sure what to do. We could talk with the UCD assessment coordinator to get help with this.
Students should interpret the grading scale correctly. There was at least one instance in 2017 where a team assumed that the progress section accounted for 50 points, so they ignored or downplayed the content and presentation sections.
Rubric rows should tie into ABET criteria.
Current Design
Rubrics have two sections: content and presentation.
The point layout ensures scores lie between 40 and 100, but due to the fact that few teams ever get lots of zeros, the distribution lies more in the 60 to 100 range.
The rubrics have lots of rows and are quite detailed (maybe too much so).
There is a progress row worth 10 of 100 points, that provides the grader flexibility on adjusting the grade wrt to anything that the other rubric rows don't specifically address. Docking this grade should always come with a written comment as to why. It was intended to let the grader subjectively think about whether the team is on track wrt to the other teams in the class and provide a mechanism for feedback about that (we had no way to give this feedback in 2016 and grades were quite inflated and down curving was necessary on the final grade).
Presentation scores are lower percentage than the content percentage.
The point ranges for each ruric row are often 0 to 1.25, 0 to 2.5, and 0 to 5. This is a bit annoying for the grader because you have to calculate different intermediary values for each row. The original spreadsheet rubrics allowed the grader to select 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 for each row, just whole numbers.
Things to potentially fix