 Rubric is fundamental to making expectations clear. They came from the fact that very early on when we had multiple people marking exams, we had to get higher inter-rater consistency. So, setting out expectations for performance allowed for that to happen. But then it became clear that, gee, if the students knew this ahead of time, things would go better. So, if you have an essay and you say, these are the expectations, that's the notion of a rubric. Then the first advantage of these things is they make very clear what's expected. And it also makes students more responsible for their learning. And it can help develop metacognitive skills about, oh, these are the things that are expected here. So, it allows students to take more responsibility. It makes things transparent. It also makes everyone accountable. Rubrics can be best developed in conjunction with the students. And so, when I speak of metacognitive skills, if you give them the list, that helps. It can help them better if you develop the rubric together. And you say, so what would make for a strong assignment here? What would the expectations be? And then you're using the rubric development as part of the learning activities in that assignment. I find that rubrics are essential if you have teaching assistants. Many of my courses involve more than 100 students or close to 100 students. So, I'll have teaching assistants assisting with the marking. And so, rubrics are essential for ensuring that the teaching assistants know which elements of the assignment I want them to accord different levels of marks for. My teaching assistants need a lot of guidance. The rubric gives some of that guidance. And I'll also mention in connection with this, I have a weekly meeting with them on Tuesdays before the Wednesday class. So, in that meeting, we go through the upcoming in-class activity and what questions and kind of help the TAs are going to be able to give during class. And what to anticipate in the marking and what is the rubric. And so, we go all through that. So, in the end, the rubric promotes consistency of marking. I use rubrics in the courses that I teach to facilitate grading. I usually teach quite large classes. And they usually have between 400 and 500 students in them. And I like to give students assignments to do. And rubrics is basically, rubrics are a way for me to streamline the grading process. Rubrics are interesting. I think some people are very comfortable with them. Some people find them too restrictive. They're really developed to give both the teacher and the student a chance to talk about assessment and work around assessment in a more transparent way. And I think that's a huge part of it. The purpose of sound assessment is not just to evaluate but to educate. And the rubric, because of how it's designed, because it makes an effort to unpack these various levels of performance in these key areas, is a roadmap to learning for the student. I think it's really important to use rubrics so that there is a standard set of criteria applied to the grading in terms of from our perspective as the people who are grading. But as far as the students themselves are concerned, it's really important that they have a rubric in anticipation of completion of an assignment, of an assessment, because it lets them know what are the requirements of the assessment, how they are expected to perform. I do use rubrics predominantly as a guide for the students for what they should be aiming for. Rubrics, for me, have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are for the students so they know exactly what they have to do. And there are cases where some students require that type of structure. And it's good for them to have that because they can always figure out where specifically they've lost marks and they understand what things are happening. Where it can be problematic, I find, is in more subjective things. I find it a bit more, maybe it's just me because I'm a quantitative type person. But in more subjective things, I have a harder time coming up with an appropriate rubric. Like, how do I determine, how do I assign a rubric to creativity? I have a bit of a love hate with rubrics, I have to say. And that's because I have a bit of a love with discovery-based learning. So there's a big part of me that likes the idea of giving students almost a bit of an ambiguous task, giving them a sense of what you're ultimately after but maybe not nailing it down too much and therefore letting them try to figure out what would make this project or whatever good or bad. You can't throw them in too much of the deep end, though. And so a rubric can play a really good role in terms of making them at least start the task. If it's too vague, they're just going to complain to you it's too vague. So you can make it a little more clear, give a sense and idea. So I often ask my students to create an efficient argument. And so if I talk about an efficient argument, I can talk about it needs to be compelling and it needs to be non-repetitive and it needs the idea has to be clear in the very first part of the work, etc. So I think rubrics help that way. I worry when rubrics become too prescriptive. The biggest disadvantage from my perspective is they're difficult to make. They're very time-consuming. The disadvantage, of course, of rubrics is that sometimes depending on how they're built, they can be too rigid and not allow enough room for flexibility in terms of interpretation and assessment, especially when you're dealing with things like interpretive types of activities like response to a cultural prompt or a literary reading or something like that.