The Center for Teaching and Learning

Rubric Grading

Derek Applewhite, Biology

The main assignment in my Bio 372: Cell Biology course, which is aimed at juniors and seniors (however, in recent years several sophomores have enrolled) is grants. Grants are an excellent way to assess the students' understanding of cell biology because they require a thorough understanding of the underlying principles that govern the inner workings of cells. They require one to not only think about questions from a human health perspective (if you are writing a grant aimed at National Institutes of Health or for the American Cancer Society for example) but also how exactly you would carry out those experiments (the technical details that working cell biologists use to answer questions).  They are also a great exercise in science communication requiring close critical reading of the primary literature and the ability to compose an argument. Using grants as a means of assessment has the added advantage of introducing those students who have aspirations to remain in academia to grant writing at an early stage in their career, and given the importance of grant writing to a scientific career, this early exposure is highly beneficial.

Assessing grants was difficult during my couple of years. Turning prose and argument into a quantifiable metric to assign a grade was not something we in the STEM fields are particularly trained to do. What was missing was a tool to help me assess the grants in an equitable and quantifiable way. The rubric I eventually adopted became that tool.

My rubrics allowed me to break down the essential features of grant, a clearly stated hypothesis, a defined gap in the knowledge, non-overlapping specific aims, into clearly delineated components that could be assessed objectively and turned into metric that could then be used to calculate a grade. Each of these components had four categories, “needs work,” “satisfactory,” “good,” and “excellent,” so not only did the rubric make it easy for me to assign a grade, it also became an important tool in communicating with the students. They were able to see a transparent breakdown of what I was asking them to and they received direct feedback about how well they accomplished the task.

In my course the students first write a specific aims page, the most important piece of grant because it defines the question you are testing, why it is important, and gives some information on how you will do it. They then write a specific aims page and Significance, the later being a concise summary of the pertinent background information, the experiments and finding from the literature that gives the reader a feel for the background information through the lens of a convincing argument. For their final exercise they write a Specific Aims page, Significance section, and then an Approach section which is the actual nuts and bolts or the details of the exact experiments they will conduct to answer the questions stated in the Specific Aims.  While the topic changes for each iteration, the format does not, so they get three attempts at mastering the Specific Aims, two attempts at the Significance, but just one chance to write the Approach section (which is by far the easiest of the three). The elements of each assignment build upon themselves, so they see the very same rubric multiple times throughout the semester. In this way, these rubrics become a writing guide, or even more simply, a checklist of essential elements of the grant.

Another consequence, which is worth further highlighting, is the clarity and transparency of feedback. The rubric decreases the ambiguity and misinterpretations of my more lengthy written comments.  I still give my overall impressions of the students’ writing but now I am able to focus these comments to the big picture, comprehensive perspective rather than muddying the waters and risking confusion with excessive statements on each and every element of the grant. Unsurprisingly, as my feedback improved in clarity and quality so did the quality of the grants. I also feel that my assessments are less subjective and help eliminate implicit and explicit biases that can creep into grading.

The rubrics I have adopted have helped me more fairly assess students grant writing, improved the clarity of my feedback, and overall elevated the quality of my communication to them and it has also made grading a much faster and easier process.