Adaptive Rubrics
Marco Carmosino, Mia Minnes · 2020
Grading is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming part of teaching. For open-ended programming, mathematical, or design problems, assigning consistent scores and giving useful feedback can be very challenging. Large classes compound this difficulty. Adding TAs to the team can help parallelize the process but may impede grading consistency and quality. We present an adaptive rubric creation and application process to enable high-quality responses to student work, at scale. This process uses exploratory data analysis to discover common patterns in student responses to a problem, then tailors a rubric and feedback to address these patterns. Our method is supported by current grading tools, which allow calculation of the simple population-level statistics we need to extract meaningful features from a corpus of student work. In this case study, we describe using adaptive rubrics for a discrete math class for CS majors: the grading team found that this process produced concrete and transparent justifications of student scores and that it facilitated conversations around grading that were grounded in course learning objectives and values.