Tools: Excel Rubric

While I have not previously used grading rubrics as a teacher, I appreciated their value this past summer as a student. During summer language intensive courses, the essay assignments’ rubrics provided clear and simple feedback on what I was doing well and what needed improvement.

A rubric will likely never take the place of a face to face meeting with a student, and a summary comment might handle a good deal of this. But I like the idea of being able to indicate concisely for a student how I thought they did on each of the assignment’s requirements.

My first thought was to use Canvas’s rubric function, but it seems like you need to assign a maximum point value for each assignment requirement, and when grading, indicate how many of those points the student earned. This makes sense, but I’d rather indicate for each requirement a letter grade whose point value corresponds to the grading scheme for the course as a whole. I’d like to then use my assigned weighting to calculate a raw score for each requirement (which will then roll up into a total score, which will then generate a letter grade).

The Excel rubric linked below performs these functions. I’ve saved it as a template so that while grading, I can open the template and then “Save As” each one by student name. I’ll assign a letter grade for each requirement, enter the resulting letter grade in Canvas, and attach the rubric to my comments on the assignment (which would include a summary comment and in-line markup).

If you would like to put this file to use, you can adjust the requirements, weighting, and grading scheme to fit your own preferences. In the event that you add any rows or columns, or move anything around on the sheet, be sure to update any affected formulas. This is particularly important for the formula that generates the letter grade, as it’s a complicated nested “IF/THEN” formula that relies on the data in the grading scheme section.

• Download sample Excel Rubric template