essay judging criteria

The Scholastic Awards Writing Rubric: What Is It and How Can It Improve Your Writing?

When jurors review writing works during the awards selection process, they must keep in mind the Awards’ three judging criteria:

Originality

Work that breaks from convention, blurs the boundaries between genres, and challenges notions of how a particular concept or emotion can be expressed.

Technical Skill

Work that uses technique to advance an original perspective or a personal vision or voice, and shows skills being utilized to create something unique, powerful, and innovative.

Emergence of a Personal Voice or Vision

Work with an authentic and unique point of view and style.

We’ve used the same judging criteria since the Awards began in 1923 and have found it useful for identifying works that show promise. But how are those criteria used when reviewing teen writing? To assist our judges with making their selections, we’ve put together a rubric that offers guides to help the jurors determine which works meet the criteria and which works exceed them.

Students and educators may want to review the rubric to see where their works fall and what they can improve. For instance, rambling sentences can drown out a strong voice, and works that are grammatically correct can fall short of the originality criteria if they don’t present any new ideas. Like any skill, writing can be improved with practice, and reviewing the rubric may help.

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Zoya Makkar, Awake from an Ignorant Slumber , Photography. Grade 10, Plano East Senior High School, Plano, TX. Karen Stanton, Educator ; Region-at-Large, Affiliate . Gold Medal 2021

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How to Judge a Contest: Guide, Shortcuts and Examples

What is a Co ntest?

A contest is an activity where skill is needed to win. Unlike a Sweepstakes where a random draw identifies the winner, in a contest the participants has to take an action that requires some degree of skill . That degree of skill depends on what the promotion or event is asking the participant to do. For example; in an essay contest, participants enter and compete by submitting original writing.

The Legal Contest Formula

Prize + consideration (monetary fee or demonstration of skill) = legal contest (in most jurisdictions)

Are Contest Legal in the US?

Yes. All 50 States allow contest promotions. All contests are allowed as long as the sponsor awards the prize based on skill and not chance.

See Contest Rules and Laws by State.

The Judging Criteria

Contests also have an element of competition that requires the Sponsor or agency to set clear contest judging criteria so participants know how their entries will be judged. This criteria will also tell the judging body what to look for and how to assign value or rank entries.

As a marketer, you can save yourself a lot of potential trouble, and complaints, if your judging criteria is clear to all participants and judges. For example: “ Es s ay Submissions must be in English, comply with Official Rules, meet all requirements called for on the Contest Website and be original work not exceeding 1,000 characters in length.”

The “How-To” Guide for Judging

In a contest, the judging criteria is an attempt to focus the participants, as well as the judges, on the expected outcome of the entry. Properly designed judging criteria aims to minimize the judges unconscious biases and focus their attention on the qualities that are going to be weighed and assigned a value or score. For example, a judging criteria score sheet may rank values as “ 33.3% for creativity, 33.3% for originality; and 33.3% for adherence to topic .”

Judges (ideally more than one) should be experts or have some degree of expertise in what they are judging. This is not a requirement, but it helps the Sponsor or contest administrator select the winner. The contestants also gain a sense of fair play when they see the winner was chosen by experts.

How to Pick Judges for the Contest

If you can’t find expert judges, then individuals or a group with a clear understanding of the judging criteria and no conflicts of interest or bias could serve as judges. Beyond the judging criteria, the judges should have seen enough examples of the work being judged to determine what is considered poor, average and exceptional within the criteria.

Judges Goals

Ultimately, judges aim to assign a total value or points to each entry and select the winner based on total amount of points earned.

Judging Shortcut

A shortcut to judging large numbers of entries is to use social media networks to judge on your behalf up to a certain degree. For example, you can run your contest on Facebook and have the fans vote for the top five entries. From there a more formalized judge or contest administrator can select the winner based on the criteria. This can work well, but there are risks associated with fan voting. One of the risks is that participants can simply ask their friends to vote for them regardless of the quality of the work. It undermines the promotional effort when a poor entry gets lots of votes. This is why we don’t recommend that fan votes make the final decision on who wins.

Protect Your Contest With Judging Criteria

Having your judging criteria set will also protect the integrity of the contest and guide judges if there is a tie. A well-articulated judging criteria will explain what to do in the event of a tie. For example; “ In the event of a tie for any potential Winning Entry, the score for Creativity/Originality will be used as a tiebreaker.” Or “If there still remains a tie, Sponsor will bring in a tie-breaking Judge to apply the same Judging Criteria to determine the winner .”

Rules for Social Media Contests

Contests are allowed in all social media platforms as long as you follow state laws and the social media platform’s own set of rules.

Facebook Contest Rules you should follow, along with a few Facebook contest ideas to help you get started. See Facebook Contest Rules
Instagram has some strict rules that you need to be aware of and follow closely if you want your promotion to be successful. See Instagram Contest Rules
Pinterest can help you connect with your customers, especially if your business is related to the types of content that often trend on Pinterest like fashion, food, and beauty. See Pinterest Promotion Rules
For Twitter see Guidelines for Promotions on Twitter (sorry, we haven’t written a rules article on Twitter yet.)
For Youtube see YouTube’s Contest Policies and Guidelines (sorry, we haven’t written a rules article on Youtube yet.)

Can You Charge Participants an Entry Fee?

Yes, as long as the winners are chosen by skill and not chance (randomly).

Remember: Prize + consideration (monetary fee or skill) = legal contest (in most jurisdictions)

Contest Official Rules Examples

Better Homes & Gardens America’s Best Front Yard Official Contest Rules

Bottom Line: Contests are a Great Marketing Tool

Contests are worth the effort and repay the sponsor handsomely. They’re fun and generate a lot of buzz, awareness and potential sales for the sponsor. Just make sure your judging criteria are set in place. If you need any help with your contest let us know at [email protected] .

Need help witha Contest? See our Contest Management Services

Want to build a sweepstakes by text? See our features and pricing .

By submitting your essay, you give the Berkeley Prize the nonexclusive, perpetual right to reproduce the essay or any part of the essay, in any and all media at the Berkeley Prize’s discretion. A “nonexclusive” right means you are not restricted from publishing your paper elsewhere if you use the following attribution that must appear in that new placement: “First submitted to and/or published by the international Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence ( www.BerkeleyPrize.org ) in competition year 20(--) (and if applicable) and winner of that year’s (First, Second, Third…) Essay prize.” Finally, you warrant the essay does not violate any intellectual property rights of others and indemnify the BERKELEY PRIZE against any costs, loss, or expense arising out of a violation of this warranty.

Registration and Submission

You (and your teammate if you have one) will be asked to complete a short registration form which will not be seen by members of the Berkeley Prize Committee or Jury.

Additional Help and Information

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Evaluation Criteria for Formal Essays

Katherine milligan.

Please note that these four categories are interdependent. For example, if your evidence is weak, this will almost certainly affect the quality of your argument and organization. Likewise, if you have difficulty with syntax, it is to be expected that your transitions will suffer. In revision, therefore, take a holistic approach to improving your essay, rather than focussing exclusively on one aspect.

An excellent paper:

Argument: The paper knows what it wants to say and why it wants to say it. It goes beyond pointing out comparisons to using them to change the reader?s vision. Organization: Every paragraph supports the main argument in a coherent way, and clear transitions point out why each new paragraph follows the previous one. Evidence: Concrete examples from texts support general points about how those texts work. The paper provides the source and significance of each piece of evidence. Mechanics: The paper uses correct spelling and punctuation. In short, it generally exhibits a good command of academic prose.

A mediocre paper:

Argument: The paper replaces an argument with a topic, giving a series of related observations without suggesting a logic for their presentation or a reason for presenting them. Organization: The observations of the paper are listed rather than organized. Often, this is a symptom of a problem in argument, as the framing of the paper has not provided a path for evidence to follow. Evidence: The paper offers very little concrete evidence, instead relying on plot summary or generalities to talk about a text. If concrete evidence is present, its origin or significance is not clear. Mechanics: The paper contains frequent errors in syntax, agreement, pronoun reference, and/or punctuation.

An appallingly bad paper:

Argument: The paper lacks even a consistent topic, providing a series of largely unrelated observations. Organization: The observations are listed rather than organized, and some of them do not appear to belong in the paper at all. Both paper and paragraphs lack coherence. Evidence: The paper offers no concrete evidence from the texts or misuses a little evidence. Mechanics: The paper contains constant and glaring errors in syntax, agreement, reference, spelling, and/or punctuation.

Criteria for Judging

Content (55%), demonstrated understanding of political courage.

Demonstrated an understanding of political courage as described by John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage
Identified an act of political courage by a U.S. elected official who served during or after 1917.
Proved that the elected official risked his or her career to address an issue at the local, state, national, or international level
Explained why the official's course of action best serves or has served the larger public interest
Outlined the obstacles, dangers, and pressures the elected official is encountering or has encountered

Originality

Thoughtful, original choice of a U.S. elected official
Story is not widely known, or a well-known story is portrayed in a unique way
Essay subject is not on the list of most written about essay subjects .

Supporting Evidence

Well-researched
Convincing arguments supported with specific examples
Critical analysis of acts of political courage

Source Material

Bibliography of five or more varied sources
Includes primary source material
Thoughtfully selected, reliable

Presentation (45%)

Quality of writing.

Style, clarity, flow, vocabulary

Organization

Structure, paragraphing, introduction and conclusion

Conventions

Syntax, grammar, spelling, and punctuation

An essay will be disqualified if:

It is not on the topic.
The subject is not an elected official.
The subject is John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, or Edward M. Kennedy.
The subject is a previous Profile in Courage Award recipient unless the essay describes an act of political courage other than the act for which the award was given.
The subject is a senator featured in Profiles in Courage .
The essay focuses on an act of political courage that occurred prior to 1917.
It does not include a minimum of five sources.
It is more than 1,000 words or less than 700 words (not including citations and bibliography.)
It is postmarked or submitted by email after the deadline.
It is not the student’s original work.

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Criteria for Judging Essays in the Creative Writing Competition 2013

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Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work

Open access
Published: 16 December 2017
Volume 76 , pages 467–481, ( 2018 )

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Joanna Tai 1 ,
Rola Ajjawi 1 ,
David Boud 1 , 2 , 3 ,
Phillip Dawson 1 &
Ernesto Panadero 1 , 4

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Evaluative judgement is the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of oneself and others. In this paper, we propose that developing students’ evaluative judgement should be a goal of higher education, to enable students to improve their work and to meet their future learning needs: a necessary capability of graduates. We explore evaluative judgement within a discourse of pedagogy rather than primarily within an assessment discourse, as a way of encompassing and integrating a range of pedagogical practices. We trace the origins and development of the term ‘evaluative judgement’ to form a concise definition then recommend refinements to existing higher education practices of self-assessment, peer assessment, feedback, rubrics, and use of exemplars to contribute to the development of evaluative judgement. Considering pedagogical practices in light of evaluative judgement may lead to fruitful methods of engendering the skills learners require both within and beyond higher education settings.

The Impact of Peer Assessment on Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis of Control Group Studies

Ethical Considerations of Conducting Systematic Reviews in Educational Research

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

How does a student come to an understanding of the quality of their efforts and make decisions on the acceptability of their work? How does an artist know which of their pieces is good enough to exhibit? How does an employee know whether their work is ready for their manager? Each of these and other common scenarios require more than the ability to do good work; they require appraisal and an understanding of standards or quality. This capability of ‘evaluative judgement’, or being able to judge the quality of one’s own and others’ work, is necessary not just in a student’s current course but for learning throughout life (Boud and Soler 2016 ). It encapsulates the ongoing interactions between the individual, their fellow students or practitioners, and standards of performance required for effective and reflexive practice.

However, current assessment and feedback practices do not necessarily operate from this perspective. Assessment design is frequently critiqued for being unidirectional, excessively content and task focused, while also positioning students as passive recipients of feedback information (e.g. Carless et al. 2011 ). Worse than failing to support the development of evaluative judgement, these approaches may even inhibit it, by producing graduates dependent on others’ assessment of their work, who are not able to identify criteria to apply in any given context. This may be because evaluative judgement is undertheorised and under-researched. In particular, although there have been some theoretical arguments about its importance (e.g. Sadler 2010 ), evaluative judgement has not been the focus of sustained attention and very little empirical work exists on the effectiveness of strategies for developing students’ evaluative judgement (Nicol 2014 ; Tai et al. 2016 ). Sadler ( 2013 ) observed that ‘quality is something I do not know how to define, but I recognise it when I see it’ (p. 8), a common experience for those dealing with abstract concepts. This perceived inability to articulate what quality is has likely impacted on our ambitions and capability to directly educate learners about quality.

Studies in the field of human judgement have brought to bear better understandings regarding our own fallibility in evaluating or judging student work (Brooks 2012 ). We may default to ‘quick thinking’, assessing intuitively rather than by thoughtful deliberation and employ referents for judgements which exist outside published criteria. Heuristics and biases are also likely to influence decision-making (Joughin et al. 2016 ). Given there are strategies to assist markers to develop their judgement (Sadler 2013 ), we may also be able to help learners develop strategies for refining their own judgement (i.e. surfacing potentially implicit quality criteria and comparing these to the espoused ones), through a range of activities and tasks which requires students to examine and interact with examples of work of varying quality.

In this paper, we trace the elaboration of evaluative judgement and related concepts in the literature and converge on a definition. We then discuss five pedagogical approaches that may support the development of evaluative judgement, and how they could be improved if evaluative judgement were a priority. We conclude with implications for future agendas in research and practice to understand and develop evaluative judgement. We argue that evaluative judgement is a necessary, distinct concept that has not been given sufficient attention in higher education research or practice. We propose that evaluative judgement underpins and integrates existing pedagogies such as self-assessment, peer assessment, and the use of exemplars. We suggest that the development of evaluative judgement is one of higher education’s ultimate goals and a necessary capability for graduates.

Tracing the evolution of ‘evaluative judgement’

The origin of evaluative judgement can be traced back to Sadler’s ( 1989 ) ideas of ‘evaluative knowledge’ (p 135), or ‘evaluative expertise’ (p 138), which students must develop to become progressively independent of their teachers. Sadler proposed that students needed to understand criteria in relation to the standards required for making quality judgements, before being able to appreciate feedback about their performance. Students then also required the ability to engage in activity to close the gap between their performance and the standards that were expected to be achieved. These proposals were specifically made in relation to the role of formative assessment in learning design: formative assessments were to aid students in understanding how complex judgements were made and to allow students to have direct, authentic experiences of evaluating others and being evaluated (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006 ). The overall goal was to enable students to develop and rely on their own evaluative judgements so that they can become independent students and eventually effective practitioners.

The term ‘sustainable assessment’ was coined to indicate a purpose of assessment that had not been sufficiently encompassed by the previous dichotomy of the summative and the formative. Sustainable assessment was proposed as assessment ‘that meets the needs of the present and [also] prepares students to meet their own future learning needs’(Boud 2000 , p. 151). This was posited as a distinct purpose of assessment: summative assessment typically met the needs of other stakeholders (i.e. for grade generation and certification), and formative assessment was commonly limited to tasks within a particular course or course unit. Sustainable assessment focused on building the capacity of students to make judgements of their own work and that of others through engagement in a variety of assessment activities so that they could be more effective learners and meet the requirements of work beyond the point of graduation.

Similarly, ideas of ‘informed judgement’ also sat firmly within the assessment literature. In Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education , Boud ( 2007 ) sought to develop an inclusive view of student assessment, locating it as a practice at the disposal of both teachers and learners rather than simply an act of teachers. To this end, assessment was taken to be any activity that informed the judgement of any of the parties involved. Those being informed included learners; many discussions of assessment positioned learners as subjects of assessments by others, or as recipients of assessment information generated by others. Assessment as informing judgement was designed to acknowledge that assessment information is vital for students in planning their own learning and that assessment activities should be established on the assumption that learning was important. As a part of this enterprise, Boud and Falchikov ( 2007 , pp. 186–190) proposed a framework for developing assessment skills for future learning. These steps towards promoting students’ informed judgement from the perspective of the learner consisted of the following: (a) identifying oneself as an active learner, (b) identifying one’s level of knowledge and the gaps in this, (c) practising testing and judging, (d) developing these skills over time, and (e) embodying reflexivity and commitment.

Returning to pedagogical practices, Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick ( 2006 ) interpreted Sadler’s ideas around evaluative knowledge to mean that students ‘must already possess some of the same evaluative skills as their teacher’ (p. 204). Through making repeated judgements about the quality of students’ work, teachers come to implicitly understand the necessary standards of competence. These understandings of quality (implicit or explicit) and striving to attain them are necessary precursors of expertise. Yet, this understanding had not previously been expected of students in such a nuanced and explicit way.

Sadler ( 2010 ) revisited the idea of evaluative judgement to further explore what surrounds acts of feedback. Here, he proposed that student capability in ‘complex appraisal’ was necessary for learning from feedback and that educators needed to do more to articulate the reasons for the information provided (i.e. quality notions) rather than providing information. Sadler also suggested that an additional method for developing this capability was peer review or assessment, which was also taken up by Gielen et al. ( 2011 ). By engaging students in making judgements, and interacting with criteria, it was thought that understandings of quality and tacit knowledge (which educators already held) would be developed. Nicol ( 2014 ) continued this argument and provided case studies to illustrate the power of peer review in developing evaluative capacity.

In parallel with the development of these ideas, the wider context of higher education had been changing internationally. The framing of courses and assessment practices around explicit learning outcomes and judging students’ work in terms of criteria and standards had become increasingly accepted (Boud 2017 ). This move towards a standard-based curriculum provided a stronger base for the establishment of students developing evaluative judgement than hitherto, because having explicit standards helps students to clarify their learning goals and what they need to master.

We suggest that the authors identified in this section were discussing the same fundamental idea: that students must gain an understanding of quality and how to make evaluative judgements, so that they may operate independently on future occasions, taking into account all forms of information and feedback comments, without explicit external direction from a teacher or teacher-like figure. This also aligns with much of the ongoing discussions in higher education focused on preparing students for professional practice, which is sometimes couched in terms of an employability agenda (Knight and Yorke 2003 ; Tomlinson 2012 ). Employers have criticised for decades the underpreparedness of graduates for the workplace and the lack of impact of the various moves made to address this concern, e.g. inclusion of communication skills and teamwork in the curriculum (e.g. Thompson 2006 ). A focus on developing evaluative skills may lead to graduates who can identify what is needed for good work in any situation and what is needed for them to produce it.

This paper therefore makes an argument for evaluative judgement as an integrating and encompassing concept, part of curricular and pedagogical goals, rather than primarily an assessment concern. Evaluative judgement speaks to a broader purpose and the reason why we employ a range of strategies to facilitate learning: to develop students’ notions of quality and how they might be identified in their actual work. Before we discuss practices which promote students’ evaluative judgement, it is necessary to indicate how we are using this term.

Defining evaluative judgement

As a term, evaluative judgement has only relatively recently been taken up in the higher and professional education literature, as a higher-level cognitive ability required for life-long learning (Cowan 2010 ). Ideas about evaluation and critical judgement being necessary for effective feedback, and therefore learning, have also been highlighted by Sadler ( 2010 ), Nicol ( 2013 , 2014 , 2014), and Boud and Molloy ( 2013 ). These scholars argue that evaluative judgement acknowledges the complexity of contextual standards and performance, supports the development of learning trajectories and mastery, and is therefore aimed at future capacities and lifelong learning.

Little empirical work has so far been conducted within an explicit evaluative judgement framework. Firstly, Nicol et al. ( 2014 ) demonstrated the ability of peer learning activities to facilitate students’ judgement making in higher education settings. Secondly, Tai et al. ( 2016 ) also explored the role of informal peer learning in producing accurate evaluative judgements, which impacted on students’ capacity to engage in feedback conversations, through a better understanding of standards. Thirdly, Barton et al. ( 2016 ) reframed formal feedback processes to develop evaluative judgement, including dialogic feedback, self-assessment, and a programmatic feedback journal.

Nevertheless, there is a wider literature on formative assessment that has not been framed under the evaluative judgement umbrella, but which can be repositioned to do so. This literature supports students developing capability for evaluative judgement either through strategies that involve self-assessment (e.g. Boud 1992 ; Panadero et al. 2016 ), peer assessment (e.g. Panadero 2016 ; Topping 2010 ), or self-regulated learning (e.g. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006 ; Panadero and Alonso-Tapia 2013 ). Although they do not use the term, these sets of studies share a common purpose with evaluative judgement: to enhance students’ critical capability via a range of learning and assessment practices. We propose that a focus on developing evaluative judgement goes a step beyond these through providing a more coherent framework to anchor these practices while adding a further perspective taken from sustainable assessment (Boud and Soler 2016 ): equipping students for future practice. However, what are the features of evaluative judgement and how does it integrate these multiple agendas?

An earlier definition of evaluative judgement by Tai et al. ( 2016 ) was

‘… the ability to critically assess a performance in relation to a predefined but not necessarily explicit standard, which entails a complex process of reflection. It has an internal application, in the form of self-evaluation, and an external application, in making decisions about the quality of others’ work’. (p. 661)

This definition was formed in the context of medical students’ learning on clinical placements. There are many variations of what ‘work’ is within the higher education setting, which are not limited to performance. Work may also constitute written pieces (essays and reports), oral presentations, creative endeavours, or other products and processes. Furthermore, many elements of the definition seemed tautological, and so, we present a simpler definition:

Evaluative judgement is the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of self and others

In alignment with Tai et al. ( 2016 ), there are two components integral to evaluative judgement which operate as complements to each other: firstly, understanding what constitutes quality and, secondly, applying this understanding through an appraisal of work, whether it be one’s own, or another’s. This second step could be thought of as the making of evaluative judgements, which is the means of exercising one’s evaluative judgement. Through appraising work, an individual has to interact with a standard (whether implicit or explicit), potentially increasing their understandings of quality. The learning of quality and the learning of judgement making are interdependent: when coupled, they provide a stronger justification for the development of both aspects, in being prepared for future work. While judgement making occurs frequently and could be done without any attention to the development of itself as a skill, we consider that the process of developing evaluative judgement needs to be deliberate and be deliberated upon. Evaluative judgement itself, however, may become unconscious when the individual has had significant experience and expertise in making evaluative judgements in a specific area.

We propose that the development of evaluative judgements can be fruitfully considered using the staged theory of expertise of decision-making (Schmidt and Rikers 2007 ). This has been illustrated through the study of how medical students learn to make clinical decisions by seeing many different patients and making decisions about them. This involves both analytical and non-analytical processes; however, as novices, this process is initially labour intensive, requiring the integration of multiple strands of knowledge in an analytical fashion. Learning to make decisions occurs through actually having to make decisions, justification of the decisions in relation to knowledge and standards, and discussion with peers, mentors, and supervisors (Ajjawi and Higgs 2008 ). As they become more experienced, medical trainees come to ‘chunk’ knowledge through making links between biomedical knowledge and particular clinical signs and symptoms. These are chunked further to form patterns or illness scripts about particular diseases, presentations, and conditions. Thus, the process becomes less analytical, with analytical reasoning used when problems do not seem to fit an existing pattern, as a safety mechanism.

In a similar way, we hypothesise that students and teachers develop the equivalent of such scripts where knowledge about what makes for quality becomes linked through repeated exposure to work, consideration of standards (whether these are implicit or explicit) and the need to justify decisions (as assessors do post hoc (Ecclestone 2001 )). These help strengthen judgements in relation to particular disciplinary genres and within communities of practice. This may explain why experienced assessors find marking of a familiar task less effortful: they have had sufficient experience to become more intuitive in their judgements based on previously formed patterns, but they still use explicit criteria and standards to rationalise their intuitive global professional judgement to others. Indeed in health, the communication of clinical judgements has been found to be a post hoc reformulation to suit the audience rather than an actual representation of the decision-making process (Ajjawi and Higgs 2012 ). Similarly, we suggest that students can develop their evaluative judgement through repeated practice. Making an evaluative judgement requires the activation of knowledge about quality in relation to a problem space. By repeating this process in different situations, students build their quality scripts for particular disciplinary assessment genres which in turn means they can make better decisions.

We note that evaluative judgement is contextual: what constitutes quality, and what a decision may look like, will depend on the setting in which the evaluative judgement is made. Evaluative judgement is domain specific: one develops expertise pertaining to a specific subject or disciplinary area, from which decisions about quality of work are made. However, the capability of identifying criteria of quality and applying these to work in context may cross domains. Evaluative judgement is also more than just an orientation to disciplinary, community, or contextual standards as applied to current instances of work, it can be carried over to future work too. There are also likely to be differences between work expected at an entry level and that conducted by experts. In areas in which it is possible to make practice explicit, the notion of learners calibrating their judgement against those of effective practitioners or other sources of expertise is also important (Boud et al. 2015 ). To develop evaluative judgement, feedback information should perhaps focus less on the quality of students’ work and more on the fidelity of their judgements about quality. Feedback is, however, but one of several practices which may develop evaluative judgement.

Current practices which develop evaluative judgement

There are several aspects of courses that already contribute to the development of students’ evaluative ability. However, they may not previously have been seen from this perspective and their potential for this purpose not fully realised. Through the formal and informal curriculum (including assessment structures), learners are likely to develop evaluative judgement. There are a range of assessment-related activities, such as self and peer assessment, which are now imbued with greater purpose through their link with evaluative judgement.

The provision of assessment criteria is an attempt to represent standards to students. However, such representations are unlikely to communicate the complex tacit knowledge embedded in standards and quality (Sadler 2007 ). Teachers are considered able to make expert and reliable judgements because of their experiences with having to make repeated judgements forming patterns or instantiations, as well as socialisation into the standards of the discipline (Ecclestone 2001 ). However, even experts vary in their interpretation of standards and use of marking criteria, especially when they are not made explicit from the outset (Bloxham et al. 2016 ). Standards reside in the practices of academic and professional communities underpinned by tacit and explicit knowledge and are, therefore, subject to varied interpretation/enactments (O’Donovan et al. 2004 ). Students develop their understanding of standards, at minimum, through the production of work for assessment and then receiving a mark: this gives them clues about the quality of their work and they may form implicit criteria for improving the work regardless of the explicit criteria. We argue that through an explicit focus on evaluative judgement, students can form systematic and hopefully better calibrated evaluative judgements rather than implicit and idiosyncratic ones. The curriculum may then better serve the function of inducting and socialising learners into a discipline, providing them with opportunities to take part in discussing standards and criteria, and the processes of making judgements (of their own and others’ work). This will help them develop appropriate evaluative judgement themselves in relation to criteria or standards and make more sense of and take greater control of their own learning (Boud and Soler 2016 ; Sadler 2010 ).

Many existing practices have potential for developing evaluative judgement. However, some of the ways in which they have been implemented are not likely to be effective for this end. Table 1 illustrates ways in which they may or may not be used to develop evaluative judgement. We focus attention on these five common practices, as they hold significant potential for further development.

Self-assessment

Self-assessment involves students appraising their own work. Earlier studies focused on student-generated marks, comparing them with those generated by teachers. Despite long-standing criticisms (Boud and Falchikov 1989 ), this strategy remains common in self-assessment research (Panadero et al. 2016 ). We suggest that persistence of this emphasis lies in several reasons. Firstly, such studies are easy to conduct and analyse. They involve little or no changes to curriculum and pedagogy. ‘Grade guessing’ can be added with little disruption to a normal class regime. Secondly, there remains a legitimate interest in understanding students’ self-marking: students exist in a grade-oriented environment. What is needed for the development of evaluative judgement is for the emphasis of self-assessment to be on eliciting and using criteria and standards as an embedded aspect of learning and teaching strategies (Thompson 2016 ). Self-assessment can more usefully be justified in terms of assisting students to develop multiple criteria and qualitatively review their own work against them and thus refine their judgements rather than generate grades that might be distorted by their potential use as a substitute for teacher grades.

The focus of evaluative judgement is not just inwards on one’s work but also outwards to others’ performance, about the two in comparison to each other, and standards. Metacognition and ‘reflective judgement thinking’ (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005 ) also fall within this category of largely self-oriented ideas. Self-assessment is typically focused on a specific task, whereby a student comes to understand the required standard and thus improves their work on the specific task at hand (Panadero et al. 2016 ). Evaluative judgements encompass these elements while also transcending the immediate task by developing a student’s judgement of quality that can be further refined and evoked in similar tasks.

Peer assessment and peer review

Similar to the literature regarding self-assessment, a significant proportion of studies of peer assessment have focused on the accuracy of marks generated and the potential for a number calculated from peer assessments to contribute to grades (Falchikov and Goldfinch 2000 ; Speyer et al. 2011 ). Simultaneously, others have pointed to the formative, educative, and pedagogical purposes of peer assessment (Dochy et al. 1999 ; Liu and Carless 2006 ; Panadero 2016 ) and consider both the receiving and the giving of peer feedback to be important for learning (van den Berg et al. 2006 ), particularly for the development of evaluative judgement (Nicol et al. 2014 ). By engaging more closely with criteria and standards, and having to compare work to these, students have reported a better understanding of quality work (McConlogue 2012 ; Tai et al. 2016 ). Many peer assessment exercises, whether formal or informal, may already contribute to the development of evaluative judgement. By a more explicit focus on evaluative judgement, students can pay close attention to what constitutes quality in others’ work and how that may transfer to their own work on the immediate task and beyond. Learning about notions of quality through assessing the work of peers may reduce the effect of cognitive biases directed towards the self when undertaking self-assessment (Dunning et al. 2004 ). It is also likely that the provider of the assessment may benefit more from the interaction than the receiver, as it is their judgement which is being exercised (Nicol et al. 2014 ).

Scholarship on feedback in higher education has progressed rapidly in recent years to move beyond merely providing students with information about their work to emphasising the effects on students’ subsequent work and to involving them as active agents in a forward-looking dialogue about their studies (Boud and Molloy 2013 ; Carless et al. 2011 ; Merry et al. 2013 ). This work suggests that feedback (termed Feedback Mark 2) should go beyond the current task to look to future instances of work and develop students’ evaluative judgement. Boud and Molloy ( 2013 ) introduced this model to supplant previous uses of ‘feed forward’. Feedback to develop evaluative judgement would emphasise dialogue to clarify applicable standards and criteria that define quality, to help refine the judgement of students about their work and to assist them to formulate actions that arise from their appreciation of their work and the information provided about it from other sources. Feedback may be oriented specifically towards evaluative judgement across a curriculum, highlighting gaps in understandings of quality and how quality is influenced by discipline and context.

A focus on evaluative judgement requires new ways to think about feedback. Comments to students are not only about their work per se but about the judgements they make about it. The information they need to refine their judgements includes whether they have chosen suitable criteria, whether they have reached justifiable decisions about the work, and what they need to do to develop these capabilities further. There is no need to repeat what students already know about the quality of their work, but to raise their awareness of where their judgement has been occluded or misguided. Guidance is then also required towards future goals and judgement making. This new focus for feedback could be thought of as occupying the highly influential ‘self-regulation’ level of Hattie and Timperley’s ( 2007 ) model of feedback.

Rubrics can be thought of as a scaffold or pedagogy to support the development of evaluative judgement. There is extensive diversity of rubric practices (Dawson 2015 ), some of which may better support the development of evaluative judgement (e.g. formative use (Panadero and Jonsson 2013 )) than others.

If rubrics are to be used to develop students’ evaluative judgement, they should be designed and used in ways that reflect the nuanced understandings of quality that experts use when making judgements about a particular type of task while acknowledging the complexity and fluidity of the practices, and hence standards, they represent. Current understandings of influences on rater judgement should also be communicated to give students a sense that there may also be unconscious, tacit, and personal factors in play. Existing work suggests that students can be trained to use analytic rubrics to evaluate their own work and the work of others (e.g. Boud et al. 2013 ); however, the ability to apply a rubric does not necessarily imply that students have developed evaluative judgement without a rubric. Hendry and Anderson ( 2013 ) proposed that marking guides are only helpful for students to understand quality when the students themselves use them to critically evaluate work. For evaluative judgement to be a sustainable capability, it needs to work in the absence of the artifice of the university. Although students’ notions of quality may be refined with each iteration of a learning task and associated engagement with standards and criteria, not all aspects of quality can be communicated through explicit criteria; some will remain tacit and embodied (Hudson et al. 2017 ).

Student co-creation of rubrics may support the development of evaluative judgement (Fraile et al. 2016 ). These approaches usually involve students collectively brainstorming sets of criteria and engaging in a teacher-supported process of discussing disciplinary quality standards and priorities. These processes may develop a more sustainable evaluative judgement capability, as they involve students in the social construction and articulation of standards: a process that may support them to develop evaluative judgement in the new fields and contexts they move into throughout their lives.

Exemplars provide instantiations of quality and an opportunity for students to exercise their evaluative judgement. A challenge in using exemplars is ensuring they are sustainable, that is, they represent features not just of a given task but of quality more broadly in the discipline or profession. This may be resolved by ensuring assessment tasks are authentic in nature. However, exemplars are likely to require some commentary for students to be able to use them to full advantage in developing their evaluative judgement.

There are a small number of research studies on the use of exemplars to develop student understanding of quality. Earlier work done by Orsmond et al. ( 2002 ) identified that student discussion regarding a range of exemplars without the revelation of grades aided in understanding notions of quality. To and Carless ( 2015 ) more recently have advocated for a ‘dialogic’ approach involving student participation in different types of discussion, as well as teacher guidance. However, teachers may need to reserve their own evaluative judgement to allow students to co-construct understandings of quality (Carless and Chan 2016 ). Students have been shown to value teacher explanation more than their own interactions with exemplars (Hendry and Jukic 2014 ). The use of exemplars in developing evaluative judgement is likely to require a delicate balance, where students are scaffolded to notice various examples of quality, without explicit ‘telling’ from the teacher.

Discussion and conclusion

We propose that developing students’ evaluative judgement should be a goal of higher education. Starting with such an integrative orientation demand refinements to existing pedagogical practices. Of the five discussed, some have a close relationship with assessment tasks; others can be part of any teaching and learning activity in any discipline.

Common to these practices is active and iterative engagement with criteria, the enactment of judgements on diverse samples of work, dialogic feedback with peers and tutors oriented towards understanding quality which may not be otherwise explicated, and articulation and justification of judgements with a focus on both immediate and future tasks. Evaluative judgement brings together these different activities and refocuses them as pedagogies to be used towards producing students who can make effective judgements within and beyond the course. We identified these pedagogies as developing evaluative judgement through the consideration of previous conceptual work which touched on the notion that students need a sense of quality to successfully undertake study and conduct their future lives as graduates (e.g. Sadler 2010 ; Boud and Falchikov 2007 ). In doing this, we have gone beyond using evaluative judgement as an explanatory term for student learning phenomena (Tai et al. 2016 ; Nicol et al. 2014 ) and sought to broaden its use to become a key justification for requiring students to engage in certain pedagogical activities.

Developing students’ evaluative judgement is important for several reasons. It provides an overarching means to communicate with students about a central purpose of these activities, how they may relate to each other and to course learning outcomes. With sceptical student-consumers, a strong educational rationale which speaks to students’ future use is necessary (Nixon et al. 2016 ). It may also persuade educators that devoting time to work-intensive activities such as using exemplars, co-creating rubrics, and undertaking self and peer assessment and feedback is worthwhile. Since the development of evaluative judgement is a continuing theme to underpin all other aspects of the course (Boud and Falchikov 2007 ), opportunities are available at every stage: in classroom and online discussions, in the ways in which learning tasks are planned and debriefed, in the construction of each assessment task and feedback process, and, most importantly, in the continuing discourse about what study is for and how it can be effective in preparing students for all types of work.

The explicit inclusion of evaluative judgement, in courses, might also actively engage student motivations to learn. The development of evaluative judgement complements and adds to other graduate attributes developed through of course of study. The notion of evaluative judgement is not a substitute for well-established features of the curriculum but a way of relating them to the formation of learners’ judgement. This additional purpose is likely to empower students in their learning context. Students will transition from being dependent novices and consumers of information to becoming agentic individuals able to participate in social notions of determining quality work. This sort of journey will require students to be supported in becoming self-regulated learners who take responsibility for their own learning and direct it accordingly (Sitzmann and Ely 2011 ).

Researchers and educators should be concerned not only with the effectiveness of interventions to develop evaluative judgement but also understanding the quality of student evaluative judgement. Existing ‘grade guessing’ research comparing student self-/peer marking against expert/teacher marking provides only a thin measure of evaluative judgement. Determining whether evaluative judgement has been developed could occur through particular self- and peer assessment activities in which students judge their own work and that of others and the qualities of the judgements made. The quality of an evaluative judgement lies not only in its result but in the thought processes and justifications used. High quality evaluative judgement involves students identifying and using appropriate criteria (both prescribed and self-generated) and discerning whether their own work and that of others meets these requirements. Through this process, students can be supported to refine their understanding of quality for future related tasks and come to know how to manage the ambiguities inherent in criteria when applied in different contexts. This presents a complex phenomenon for researchers and educators to understand or measure, for which correlations between teacher and student marks are inadequate.

This paper has developed a new definition and focus on evaluative judgement to describe why we might want to develop it in our students and how to go about this. Evaluative judgement provides the reason ‘why’ for implementing certain pedagogies. Further theoretical work may assist in better understanding how to develop evaluative judgement amongst students. While we have characterised it as a capability, there may also be motivational, attitudinal, and embodied aspects of evaluative judgement to consider. Empirical studies are also required to test aforementioned strategies for developing evaluative judgement, tracking the longitudinal development of evaluative judgement and professional practice outcomes over several years. Returning to Sadler’s ( 2013 ) statement that quality is something I do not know how to define, but I recognise it when I see it, we have argued that a focus on evaluative judgement might enable a frank and explicit discussion of what constitutes quality and explored a range of common practices which may develop this capability. The exercise of evaluative judgement is a way of framing what makes for good practice.

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Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to attendees of the Symposium on Evaluative Judgement on 17 and 18 October 2016 at Deakin University, who contributed to discussions on the topic of this paper. In particular, Jaclyn Broadbent contributed to initial conceptual discussions, while Margaret Bearman, David Carless, Gloria Dall’Alba, Gordon Joughin, Susie Macfarlane, and Darrall Thompson also commented on a draft version of this paper.

Ernesto Panadero is funded by the Spanish Ministry (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) via the Ramón y Cajal programme (file id. RYC-2013-13469).

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Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D. et al. Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. High Educ 76 , 467–481 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3

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English Composition 1

Evaluation and grading criteria for essays.

IVCC's online Style Book presents the Grading Criteria for Writing Assignments .

This page explains some of the major aspects of an essay that are given special attention when the essay is evaluated.

Thesis and Thesis Statement

Probably the most important sentence in an essay is the thesis statement, which is a sentence that conveys the thesis—the main point and purpose of the essay. The thesis is what gives an essay a purpose and a point, and, in a well-focused essay, every part of the essay helps the writer develop and support the thesis in some way.

The thesis should be stated in your introduction as one complete sentence that

identifies the topic of the essay,
states the main points developed in the essay,
clarifies how all of the main points are logically related, and
conveys the purpose of the essay.

In high school, students often are told to begin an introduction with a thesis statement and then to follow this statement with a series of sentences, each sentence presenting one of the main points or claims of the essay. While this approach probably helps students organize their essays, spreading a thesis statement over several sentences in the introduction usually is not effective. For one thing, it can lead to an essay that develops several points but does not make meaningful or clear connections among the different ideas.

If you can state all of your main points logically in just one sentence, then all of those points should come together logically in just one essay. When I evaluate an essay, I look specifically for a one-sentence statement of the thesis in the introduction that, again, identifies the topic of the essay, states all of the main points, clarifies how those points are logically related, and conveys the purpose of the essay.

If you are used to using the high school model to present the thesis of an essay, you might wonder what you should do with the rest of your introduction once you start presenting a one-sentence statement of your thesis. Well, an introduction should do two important things: (1) present the thesis statement, and (2) get readers interested in the subject of the essay.

Instead of outlining each stage of an essay with separate sentences in the introduction, you could draw readers into your essay by appealing to their interests at the very beginning of your essay. Why should what you discuss in your essay be important to readers? Why should they care? Answering these questions might help you discover a way to draw readers into your essay effectively. Once you appeal to the interests of your readers, you should then present a clear and focused thesis statement. (And thesis statements most often appear at the ends of introductions, not at the beginnings.)

Coming up with a thesis statement during the early stages of the writing process is difficult. You might instead begin by deciding on three or four related claims or ideas that you think you could prove in your essay. Think in terms of paragraphs: choose claims that you think could be supported and developed well in one body paragraph each. Once you have decided on the three or four main claims and how they are logically related, you can bring them together into a one-sentence thesis statement.

All of the topic sentences in a short paper, when "added" together, should give us the thesis statement for the entire paper. Do the addition for your own papers, and see if you come up with the following:

Topic Sentence 1 + Topic Sentence 2 + Topic Sentence 3 = Thesis Statement

Organization

Effective expository papers generally are well organized and unified, in part because of fairly rigid guidelines that writers follow and that you should try to follow in your papers.

Each body paragraph of your paper should begin with a topic sentence, a statement of the main point of the paragraph. Just as a thesis statement conveys the main point of an entire essay, a topic sentence conveys the main point of a single body paragraph. As illustrated above, a clear and logical relationship should exist between the topic sentences of a paper and the thesis statement.

If the purpose of a paragraph is to persuade readers, the topic sentence should present a claim, or something that you can prove with specific evidence. If you begin a body paragraph with a claim, a point to prove, then you know exactly what you will do in the rest of the paragraph: prove the claim. You also know when to end the paragraph: when you think you have convinced readers that your claim is valid and well supported.

If you begin a body paragraph with a fact, though, something that it true by definition, then you have nothing to prove from the beginning of the paragraph, possibly causing you to wander from point to point in the paragraph. The claim at the beginning of a body paragraph is very important: it gives you a point to prove, helping you unify the paragraph and helping you decide when to end one paragraph and begin another.

The length and number of body paragraphs in an essay is another thing to consider. In general, each body paragraph should be at least half of a page long (for a double-spaced essay), and most expository essays have at least three body paragraph each (for a total of at least five paragraphs, including the introduction and conclusion.)

Support and Development of Ideas

The main difference between a convincing, insightful interpretation or argument and a weak interpretation or argument often is the amount of evidence than the writer uses. "Evidence" refers to specific facts.

Remember this fact: your interpretation or argument will be weak unless it is well supported with specific evidence. This means that, for every claim you present, you need to support it with at least several different pieces of specific evidence. Often, students will present potentially insightful comments, but the comments are not supported or developed with specific evidence. When you come up with an insightful idea, you are most likely basing that idea on some specific facts. To present your interpretation or argument well, you need to state your interpretation and then explain the facts that have led you to this conclusion.

Effective organization is also important here. If you begin each body paragraph with a claim, and if you then stay focused on supporting that claim with several pieces of evidence, you should have a well-supported and well-developed interpretation.

As stated above, each body paragraph generally should be at least half of a page long, so, if you find that your body paragraphs are shorter than this, then you might not be developing your ideas in much depth. Often, when a student has trouble reaching the required minimum length for an essay, the problem is the lack of sufficient supporting evidence.

In an interpretation or argument, you are trying to explain and prove something about your subject, so you need to use plenty of specific evidence as support. A good approach to supporting an interpretation or argument is dividing your interpretation or argument into a few significant and related claims and then supporting each claim thoroughly in one body paragraph.

Insight into Subject

Sometimes a student will write a well-organized essay, but the essay does not shed much light on the subject. At the same time, I am often amazed at the insightful interpretations and arguments that students come up with. Every semester, students interpret aspects of texts or present arguments that I had never considered.

If you are writing an interpretation, you should reread the text or study your subject thoroughly, doing your best to notice something new each time you examine it. As you come up with a possible interpretation to develop in an essay, you should re-examine your subject with that interpretation in mind, marking passages (if your subject is a literary text) and taking plenty of notes on your subject. Studying your subject in this way will make it easier for you to find supporting evidence for your interpretation as you write your essay.

The insightfulness of an essay often is directly related to the organization and the support and development of the ideas in the essay. If you have well-developed body paragraphs focused on one specific point each, then it is likely that you are going into depth with the ideas you present and are offering an insightful interpretation.

If you organize your essay well, and if you use plenty of specific evidence to support your thesis and the individual claims that comprise that thesis, then there is a good possibility that your essay will be insightful.

Clarity is always important: if your writing is not clear, your meaning will not reach readers the way you would like it to. According to IVCC's Grading Criteria for Writing Assignments , "A," "B," and "C" essays are clear throughout, meaning that problems with clarity can have a substantial effect on the grade of an essay.

If any parts of your essay or any sentences seem just a little unclear to you, you can bet that they will be unclear to readers. Review your essay carefully and change any parts of the essay that could cause confusion for readers. Also, take special note of any passages that your peer critiquers feel are not very clear.

"Style" refers to the kinds of words and sentences that you use, but there are many aspects of style to consider. Aspects of style include conciseness, variety of sentence structure, consistent verb tense, avoidance of the passive voice, and attention to the connotative meanings of words.

Several of the course web pages provide information relevant to style, including the following pages:

"Words, Words, Words"
Using Specific and Concrete Diction
Integrating Quotations into Sentences
Formal Writing Voice

William Strunk, Jr.'s, The Elements of Style is a classic text on style that is now available online.

Given the subject, purpose, and audience for each essay in this course, you should use a formal writing voice . This means that you should avoid use of the first person ("I," "me," "we," etc.), the use of contractions ("can't," "won't," etc.), and the use of slang or other informal language. A formal writing voice will make you sound more convincing and more authoritative.

If you use quotations in a paper, integrating those quotations smoothly, logically, and grammatically into your own sentences is important, so make sure that you are familiar with the information on the Integrating Quotations into Sentences page.

"Mechanics" refers to the correctness of a paper: complete sentences, correct punctuation, accurate word choice, etc. All of your papers for the course should be free or almost free from errors. Proofread carefully, and consider any constructive comments you receive during peer critiques that relate to the "mechanics" of your writing.

You might use the grammar checker if your word-processing program has one, but grammar checkers are correct only about half of the time. A grammar checker, though, could help you identify parts of the essay that might include errors. You will then need to decide for yourself if the grammar checker is right or wrong.

The elimination of errors from your writing is important. In fact, according to IVCC's Grading Criteria for Writing Assignments , "A," "B," and "C" essays contain almost no errors. Significant or numerous errors are a characteristic of a "D" or "F" essay.

Again, the specific errors listed in the second table above are explained on the Identifying and Eliminating Common Errors in Writing web page.

You should have a good understanding of what errors to look out for based on the feedback you receive on graded papers, and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have about possible errors or about any other aspects of your essay. You just need to ask!

Writing Assessment: Scoring Criteria

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Essay Scoring Rubric

Your Writing Assessment essay will be scored based on the rubric in your DRWA Doctoral Writing Assessment classroom focusing on:

Central idea of essay is clear, related to the prompt, and developed
Paraphrase and analysis of reading material supports the overall argument
Organization of ideas uses a logical structure, clear paragraphs, and appropriate transitions
Grammar and mechanics effectively communicates meaning

To view the scoring criteria for each rubric category, visit the DRWA Doctoral Writing Assessment: Essay Score module in your DRWA classroom.

To test out of the required Graduate Writing I and Graduate Writing II courses, you must show mastery of the writing skills represented in the rubric in your DRWA Doctoral Writing Assessment classroom.

If you are required to take Graduate Writing I and/or Graduate Writing II based on your assessment score, you can learn more about the learning outcomes of these courses below.

Graduate Writing I Learning Outcomes

Graduate writing ii learning outcomes, top 3 scoring criteria faqs.

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Using Rubrics to Review Scholarship and Fellowship Applications

Your institution’s programs are one of a kind—and offering scholarships and fellowships can help you share these assets with a wider community. As you design applications and set up review, remember that the first step in any smart process is the creation of a thorough rubric. Rubrics are detailed outlines for how each application will be read and scored. Using rubrics to review scholarship and fellowship applications helps reviewers stay consistent, minimizes personal bias, and provides a useful reference for everyone involved in the process.

Most commonly created by teachers to assess student performance, rubrics are useful for evaluation processes of all kinds. If you create a rubric before building your application, it can help ensure all requested information is relevant and necessary. This saves time for applicants as well as your team.

According to Brown University’s Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, there are a series of vital considerations for creating a successful review system. Here are six steps they identified, refocused for using rubrics to review scholarship and fellowship applications:

1. Define the rubric’s purpose

Consider the components of your application and how each should be assessed. What would an outstanding application include? How detailed do you want to be with scoring? Should each application component receive a distinct score?

2. Choose between a holistic and analytic rubric

In terms of basic distinctions, the holistic rubric is easier to put together but offers less detail than an analytic rubric regarding specific strengths and weaknesses within an application. For example, a holistic rubric might ask reviewers to assign a score of 1-4 for the application as a whole (where a Level 1 application includes a high GPA, excellent references, and an outstanding essay). An analytic rubric would assess the GPA, references, and essay using distinct scales and criteria.

holistic rubric for those using rubrics to review scholarship applications

3. Define rubric criteria

These criteria identify each component for assessment. For fellowships and scholarships, common review criteria include:

Academic achievement (GPA)
Test scores
Personal statements
Resumes or CVs
Application essays
Supplemental essays
Letters of recommendation
Extracurricular achievements

4. Design the rating scale

Although this could include letter grades, for application review, numeric scores are likely to be the most useful. Most scales include 3-5 rating levels.

5. Write descriptions for each rating

Clarity and consistency of language here will help accurately guide reviewers. Focus on observations that can be accurately measured and include the degree to which criteria are successfully met.

6. Finalize your rubric (for now)

Format your rubric for easy access and reference, assess effectiveness, collect relevant feedback, and revise accordingly. Using rubrics to review scholarship and fellowship applications should involve ongoing updates to your system—a rubric is only as effective as it is relevant to current goals.

Other considerations

A strong rubric not only helps guide reviewers—it also offers the opportunity to deeply assess and streamline your application. If part of your application didn’t make the rubric, do you really need it to review your candidates?

A few additional rubric strategies to employ:

Assess your rubric carefully for language that could be misinterpreted. It’s important to avoid assumptions about reviewers, especially regarding how they will process the criteria, rating scale, and descriptions you provide.
Steer clear of industry jargon or acronyms. Use plain language and where possible and give examples to solidify what you want to say.
Determine the relative weight of review criteria. For example, will letters of recommendation be more or less important than GPA? Design your rating scale accordingly.

Sharing your rubric for transparency

Anyone who takes the time to apply for your scholarship or fellowship wants to submit the best possible application. Unfortunately, every application process is different and prospective applicants may not know what your organization is looking for. Sharing clear information about your assessment criteria and timeline is a huge help—and rubrics are a great way to do this.

While you don’t have to show the point system or all of your evaluation guidelines, sharing the main criteria for a successful application established in the rubric benefits everyone involved in your process:

It demonstrates respect for applicants’ time. When they can access assessment guidelines, applicants know where to focus in assembling their application.
It increases the appropriateness of applications. Clarity around expectations and review criteria can help you receive more relevant applications, saving your review team time.
It minimizes questions and doubt. If applicants know what to prioritize in their application, they’re less likely to reach out and inquire. That’s one less email for both of you.
It spotlights your organization’s values. Using rubrics to review scholarship and fellowship applications (and being willing to share from them) demonstrates that you care about diligent, fair, and consistent review. It also shows that you understand the value this information holds for applicants and you’re prepared to support them.

Being more transparent about your process by sharing the criteria in your rubric sets you apart from other institutions, facilitates trust from potential applicants, and brings clarity to the whole process. Just be sure what you share is easy to access and written in a simple, jargon-free format.

Submittable’s custom review forms are perfect for incorporating your rubric. Looking for scholarship management software or fellowship management software ? Submittable is here to help. For more tips on a fair and efficient scholarship and fellowship review process, check out this guide .

Rachel Mindell is a Special Projects Editor at Submittable. She also writes and teaches poetry. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Submittable powers you with tools to launch, manage, measure and grow your social impact programs, locally and globally. From grants and scholarships to awards and CSR programs, we partner with you so you can start making a difference, fast. The start-to-finish platform makes your workflow smarter and more efficient, leading to better decisions and bigger impact. Easily report on success, and learn for the future—Submittable is flexible and powerful enough to grow alongside your programs.

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PDF Essay Contest Judging Rubric
Essay Contest Judging Rubric For each criterion listed, score the essay on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the best score. Use a separate form for each essay. Do not score in decimals or fractions - whole numbers only. 5=Excellent 4=Above Average 3=Average 2=Below Average 1=Poor/Incomplete Criteria 5 4 3 21 Score
PDF RULES AND JUDGING RUBRIC
following criteria: • Addresses theme — The piece reflects the stated theme of the contest, "Wild Ideas" and the writing prompt "The wilderness pulled at me. It still does."-author Gary Paulsen, speaking in a New York Times interview. Prompt does not need to be used in the piece. Uses specific and relevant detail to engage the reader.
PDF This Judging Rubric will be used as a guide to rank the essays. Feel
sheets together are used to complete the overall contest tally sheet (provided). The essay with the lowest numeric score is the 1st place winner. Essay Criteria Please refer to the Judging Rubric as well as the criteria below, to guide your ranking decisions. o High Importance: Content o A Cowboy Ethic/Code of the West Principle.
How to create criteria for judging a contest
Creating criteria for judging a contest with examples. If you look around, you will find innumerable and different kinds of contests happening everywhere. Now, these contests can range from being a beauty pageant to being something as simple as answering a simple question on social media. Listed below are different kinds of contests and the ...
How To Judge A Writing Competition
This will be my first one.". So, Patty, (and anyone else who happens to be reading), here are my five top tips for judging a writing competition: 1. You're a reader, first. The title of Judge sounds grand, but forget that for now. Essentially, you're a reader. Many writers (especially those entering a competition) create something to ...
The Scholastic Awards Writing Rubric: What Is It and How Can It Improve
To assist our judges with making their selections, we've put together a rubric that offers guides to help the jurors determine which works meet the criteria and which works exceed them. Students and educators may want to review the rubric to see where their works fall and what they can improve. For instance, rambling sentences can drown out a ...
Judging
Judging Global Winners 2024 Regional Winners 2024 Winning Essays 2024 Winning Essays 2023 Winning Essays 2022 Argumentative ... Find out how essays from each stream will be judged and graded here: Creative essay rubric . Argumentative essay rubric. Journalistic essay rubric.
PDF Judging Criteria
Non-Fiction (i.e. personal essay, critical essay) Judging Criteria • Style & presentation: punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax are standard. • Language: vocabulary is appropriate to the subject and style. Word choice is precise and evocative. • Form & structure: sentence length and paragraph breaks enhance the clarity, meaning,
How to Judge a Contest: Guide, Shortcuts and Examples
Judging Shortcut. A shortcut to judging large numbers of entries is to use social media networks to judge on your behalf up to a certain degree. For example, you can run your contest on Facebook and have the fans vote for the top five entries. From there a more formalized judge or contest administrator can select the winner based on the criteria.
Berkeley Prize Essay Competition
Judging Criteria. Judging for the essay competition is on a numeric system. The members of the BERKELEY PRIZE Committee are asked to evaluate each essay in terms of the following criteria: Does the Proposal address the Question? How creative, or creatively developed, is the Proposal? Would the Proposal be clear to a broad audience?
PDF Essay Contest Judging Rubric
For each criterion listed, score the essay on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the best score. Use a separate form for each essay. Do not score in decimals or fractions - whole numbers only. 5=Excellent. 4=Above Average 3=Average 2=Below Average 1=Poor/Incomplete. Criteria.
PDF Argumentative essay rubric
Logical, compelling progression of ideas in essay;clear structure which enhances and showcases the central idea or theme and moves the reader through the text. Organization flows so smoothly the reader hardly thinks about it. Effective, mature, graceful transitions exist throughout the essay.
PDF Science Fair Essay Contest Judging Sheet
Standard Usage - uses proper grammar, spelling and punctuation. 0, 3, 5. Neatness & Structure - paper is presented appropriately and according to contest rules (including word minimums, font, font size and spacing) 0, 3, 5. Effectiveness - the essay could be understood by the student's peers. 0, 3, 5.
PDF Criteria For Evaluating An Essay
Logically complete the development of the thesis or build to the main point of the essay. Format (5 points) MLA-e (pp. 161 - 169) Follow the MLA format. Creativity and Revision (up to 5 points) W-3 - W-3g (pp. 9 - 16) Up to 5 extra points may be awarded for creative expression or improvement through revision.
Evaluation Criteria for Formal Essays
Evaluation Criteria for Formal Essays Katherine Milligan. Please note that these four categories are interdependent. For example, if your evidence is weak, this will almost certainly affect the quality of your argument and organization. Likewise, if you have difficulty with syntax, it is to be expected that your transitions will suffer.
Criteria for Judging
The subject is a previous Profile in Courage Award recipient unless the essay describes an act of political courage other than the act for which the award was given. The subject is a senator featured in Profiles in Courage. The essay focuses on an act of political courage that occurred prior to 1917. It does not include a minimum of five sources.
How to Judge a Contest: Guide, Shortcuts and Examples
Judging Shortcut. A shortcut to judging large numbers of entries is to use social media networks to judge on your behalf up to a certain degree. For example, you can run your contest on Facebook and have the fans vote for the top five entries. From there a more formalized judge or contest administrator can select the winner based on the criteria.
Criteria for Judging Essays in the Creative Writing Competition 2013
Criteria for Judging Essays in the Creative Writing Competition 2013 In 2013 a percent system will be applied in an effort to streamline the writing competition and to make judging less subjective, and more easily understood. Each essay should initially be read by 2‐3 judges still, and the following criteria should be applied: Creativity ...
Teen Writing Contest Rules and Judging Criteria
1) We have an Editor that reads every single essay in the high school and college sections of the website for each writing contest prompt. 2) That Editor flags the first round of essay finalists. 3) We then have a second Peer Editor that double checks the first Editor's picks and either adds or deletes essays to the finalist pool as needed to ...
Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make ...
The framing of courses and assessment practices around explicit learning outcomes and judging students' work in terms of criteria and standards had become ... Hendry, G. D., & Anderson, J. (2013). Helping students understand the standards of work expected in an essay: using exemplars in mathematics pre-service education classes. Assessment ...
ENG 1001: Evaluation Criteria for Essays
According to IVCC's Grading Criteria for Writing Assignments , "A," "B," and "C" essays are clear throughout, meaning that problems with clarity can have a substantial effect on the grade of an essay. If any parts of your essay or any sentences seem just a little unclear to you, you can bet that they will be unclear to readers.
Academic Guides: Writing Assessment: Scoring Criteria
Essay Scoring Rubric. Your Writing Assessment essay will be scored based on the rubric in your DRWA Doctoral Writing Assessment classroom focusing on: Central idea of essay is clear, related to the prompt, and developed. Paraphrase and analysis of reading material supports the overall argument.
Using Rubrics to Review Scholarship and Fellowship Applications
These criteria identify each component for assessment. For fellowships and scholarships, common review criteria include: 4. Design the rating scale. Although this could include letter grades, for application review, numeric scores are likely to be the most useful. Most scales include 3-5 rating levels. 5.

The Scholastic Awards Writing Rubric: What Is It and How Can It Improve Your Writing?

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Introduction

Tracing the evolution of ‘evaluative judgement’

Defining evaluative judgement

Current practices which develop evaluative judgement

Self-assessment

Peer assessment and peer review

Discussion and conclusion

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English Composition 1

Thesis and Thesis Statement

Organization

Support and Development of Ideas

Insight into Subject

Writing Assessment: Scoring Criteria

Essay Scoring Rubric

Graduate Writing I Learning Outcomes

Walden Resources

Centers and Offices

Student Resources

Using Rubrics to Review Scholarship and Fellowship Applications

1. Define the rubric’s purpose

2. Choose between a holistic and analytic rubric

3. Define rubric criteria

4. Design the rating scale

5. Write descriptions for each rating

6. Finalize your rubric (for now)

Other considerations

Sharing your rubric for transparency

Review together. From anywhere.

About Submittable

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