 Using clear marking criteria and rubrics will ensure that students who perform well and avoid breaches of academic integrity will be rewarded with good marks. Defining marking criteria in advance of the assignment submission and sharing that with students will enable them to know what to do to perform well and achieve good marks. Let's look at how you might do this by taking DCU's virtual learning environment loop as an example. Devising marking criteria into a structured plan or guide will both help students align their own work to a standard and also help guide lecturers as they compose feedback and award marks for certain criteria. Each marking criterion is defined by a descriptor and a range of marks or letter grade or scale accompanies each criterion. Lecturers choose a mark that they feel corresponds with the quality of the student's work and they compose feedback specific to that student. Some benefits of using marking guides include allowing lecturers to award marks along a spectrum, allowing lecturers freedom to devise specific feedback for students, and helping lecturers to plan classes by easily identifying assessment criteria that can be aligned to the teaching and learning. In loop a marking guide can be created as an advanced grading method within an assignment. On your loop course page click turn editing on and either create a new assignment or click edit edit settings on an existing assignment. In the administration panel click advanced grading and change the active grading method to marking guide. Two buttons will appear. You can either create a new instance of a marking guide from a template if you have one, or you can create one from scratch. Let's choose that option. Give your marking guide a title. Use the description field to explain what this marking guide is for. Scroll down to the criteria area. Here is where you will enter the detail of your marking guide. Think of a marking guide like a form. You move from top to bottom through each of the criteria, composing feedback for students as to how well they met a particular criterion and allocating a mark from an available range. The description of each criterion should be meaningful and useful to students. Let's start creating our marking guide for this assessment. Simply click on the first field to edit the criterion's name. Then enter a description of this criterion for the students. You can use the same description for the markers if you wish, or you may want to give additional or lecturer only information in this field. Enter the maximum mark available for this criterion. Click Add Criterion to create space for the next criterion. Enter the name, description and mark for this second criterion. Keep working your way down the marking guide, adding as many criteria as you need. A useful feature of Loop's marking guide is frequently used comments. Lecturers can use this feature to create a bank of comments that they regularly use when composing feedback to students. Click to access the first field and enter your first frequently used comment. Click Add Frequently Used Comment to create a second field for your second comment. You can use this button to keep adding more and more comments. When all your criteria, descriptions and marks have been entered, scroll to the end of the page, being sure to leave all of the marking guide options ticked, and click Save Marking Guide and make it ready. When students click in to view their loop assignment, they have access to the marking guide, so when they are preparing their assignment they have clear criteria available to them. Creating a marking guide is quick and straightforward and provides a frame for lecturers to compose specific student feedback at a later stage in the assessment process. Consider co-creating a marking guide with students. This will create a sense of ownership and helps build capacity among students for the assessment task. See principle 12 for more information.