Chris M. Anson, Deanna P. Dannels, Pamela Flash, and Amy L. Housley Gaffney offer a great reminder about rubrics in their new article:
Anson, C. M., Dannels, D. P., Flash, P., & Housley Gaffney, A. L. (2012). Big rubrics and weird genres: The futility of using generic assessment tools across diverse instructional contexts. The Journal of Writing Assessment, 5(1). Retrieved from http://journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?article=57
The authors suggest that generic, program-wide rubrics lull stakeholders with a false sense of security regarding assessment outcomes. They advocate abandoning one-size-fits-all rubrics in favor of context-specific rubrics, and they support their call with evidence from assessment projects at the University of Minnesota and North Carolina State University.
If Anson et al. convince you of the merits of a context-specific rubric, an earlier Writing Faculty post offers tips for constructing your own localized rubrics. How do you construct context-specific rubrics that you can commit to using?