As Law Professors strive to provide more formative assessment and more meaningful evaluation of student performance, rubrics have become a hallmark of good assessment practices. They provide clear direction for students and a more focused classroom experience. They help students and professors work from a common understanding of what is expected.
However, rubric creation is not an exact science. At the 2011 Institute for Law Teaching and Learning Conference “Engaging and Asssessing Our Students,” four of us – Albany Law Academic Dean Connie Mayer, Villanova Professor Michele Pistone, Professor Marisa S. Cianciarulo at Chapman University School of Law and Albany Law Professor Mary Lynch – will be presenting a workshop on Using Rubrics to Assess and Engage Law Students. In an effort to create better rubrics and understand their impact on student learning, we intend to follow up our presentation with discussion and information exchange on this page dedictated solely to rubric discussion. Please feel free to post your rubrics, tells us what works and what does not work, and comment on what others are doing. Also if you have something you’d like posted but dont’ know how, just e-mail krama@albanylaw.edu.
Some sample rubrics:
Rubric development is a humbling experience…