Student Development Of Grading And Assessment Criteria

Faculty at Ohio University increasingly use rubrics to simultaneously grade student work and assess student learning. One tenet of this “Criterion-Based Grading” system is that the basis for grading is known to the students, allowing them to evaluate their own work before submitting it. Beyond making such self-evaluation possible, we wish to actively encourage it. We consider the ability to evaluate one’s own work to be an essential skill and habit of a practicing engineer. However, we have learned by experience that even when students are provided with the rubric, they seldom evaluate their own work effectively. In an effort to counter this, students in a sophomore-level “Energy Balances” course are asked to help develop a rubric that will be used to grade and assess a team project in the course. The mechanism for including student input in rubric development and assessing the ability of the students to use the resulting rubrics for self evaluation will be discussed.