Rúbricas !

There are a lot of common places to ditch grades, like "Grades don't determine intelligence, they test obedience" or "Too many teachers would use grades and points like weapons to force students into compliance. This is NOT about learning. It's control". Like there were any easy way out the system or any easy answer to the question, how to measure success / quality of work / learning progress of our students?  At a certain point, teachers are forced by the system to translate their human appreciation into a single number or a single letter.

Some initiatives deliberately question low grading as a tool for indicating failure (see more...), some other initiatives gradually introduce grading only when students turned 15 (see more...).  Two very different words converging into  one common educational core concept: students need to find motivation and joy in their learning process and, at the same time, be prepared for "the outside of schools". 

In my pursue for answers to these matters, I came across rubrics. Rubrics are scoring guides used to assess the quality of students´ constructed responses. They are developed considering a specific structure,  in the form of a matrix,  to provide students with informative text about quality expectations. Take a look at the following image, which is self-explanatory: 

The performance descriptors describe the relative differences between performances at each level. These descriptors are written in a simple straight forward way and they must be short. Good descriptors include: 

• Specific aspects of the performance which will be different at different levels. For example: analyses the effect of …/describes the effects of … /lists the effects of …
• Adjectives, adjectival phrases, adverbs and adverbial phrases are used where the aspects of a performance stay the same across the levels, but there is a qualitative difference to the performance. For example: - accurately explains/explains with some accuracy/explains with limited accuracy - provides a complex explanation/provides a detailed explanation/provides a limited explanation - shows a comprehensive knowledge/shows a sound knowledge/shows a basic knowledge.
• Numeric references. Numbers identify quantitative differences between levels. For example, - provides three examples/provides two examples/provides an example - uses several strategies/uses some strategies/uses few or no strategies*