As part of my efforts to refine my methods for grading and giving feedback on high school music tech projects, I’ve decided to use the opportunity to make a standardized rubric for my projects. In many ways, this document is tuned to feed data into my SLO’s for the year as well.
The main features of the rubric:
- A nominal self-evaluation, simply to provide some context for the finished product
- An area for actual feedback (notes) at the bottom
- Scoring “boxes” are tuned to allow most students to fall within the “emerging mastery” category. Important if the SLO is written to require movement to a new box by semester’s end
- Max score is possible in Box 3 and 4, giving credit for both accelerated students and those clearly on track
- Low end of rubric is flexible to not totally kill the grades of lower achieving students
- Score is out of 30, balanced between technical issues and aesthetic issues
I set aside a day to present projects, during which I use the sheet to mark the grades. It usually works out to one class period as long as we keep the projects playing.
I haven’t used this yet, but it’s the best representation of how I evaluate my students’ projects. Let me know what you think of it!
