![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/213\/2025\/03\/Wong-Baker-Faces-Scale.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFrom my vantage point, I thought it was going to be helpful. But I got closer and discovered it really wasn\u2019t enlightening. Hurts a \u201clittle bit\u201d vs. a \u201clittle more\u201d vs. \u201ceven more\u201d? I didn\u2019t find this particularly useful – although I did like the faces!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It got me thinking about our students. When I was in the faculty role, I recall doing a rather mediocre job helping my students understand my grading standards. I certainly talked about my expectations for their writing assignments (essay questions on exams, research assignments, etc.), and I talked about how I construct exams (I wasn\u2019t testing memorization).. But I didn\u2019t develop clear rubrics early in my teaching career. That came later – and my rubrics were pretty rudimentary because I wasn\u2019t trained in those things (like so many of us who teach at the college level).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine being a student and being told that your grade of C will reflect a measure of \u201churts a little more\u201d and your B reflects \u201churts a little less\u201d. Our students bring remarkable talents and skills and strengths to our classrooms. We want to honor and support those strengths, and one way to do that is to provide grading rubrics that help students study more effectively because they understand our expectations for their learning. I am on a year-long health journey in 2025. In the early stages of this journey I\u2019ve found myself being asked to \u201crate my pain\u201d on a scale of one to ten. Have you ever had to do that? I find the question hard to answer. What, after all, constitutes a 2 on the pain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/avpacad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Faculty who are learning – or will soon learn – the features of Blackboard Ultra<\/a> (the transition occurs with our Summer 2025 classes), will no doubt celebrate the rubric tool that is available. It will take the guesswork out of creating a rubric for an assignment. And of course faculty members can adapt that \u201cdraft rubric\u201d as they see fit. Rubrics can help our students understand what we expect, and how we grade, and because we\u2019re not all trained in crafting effective rubrics this tool in Blackboard Ultra will be very useful. I encourage all faculty to get acquainted with Blackboard Ultra and take advantage of all its features, including its AI-supported tool to develop rubrics. Let\u2019s move away from \u2018hurts a little less\u201d to something more robust, specific, and informative for our students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"