Community reviews for Rubistar

Overall, I love this as a teaching tool and have not yet found anything even close enough to rival it.

This is a decent tool to create rubrics. I like that you can create a rubric very quickly. However, it is limited in that you typically can only create a rubric in one topic area, whereas many teachers use multiple items to assess students. I often download the rubrics into a Microsoft Word table so I can edit it and merge more than one rubric into one. This has worked well for my needs. I also put a weight on each item on the rubric . For instance, content would typically carry more weight that grammar. I usually give students a copy of the rubric ahead of time so they know the expectations beforehand.

Wonderful product. Students and parents benefit from knowing what standards are expected and reduces are arguments over teacher's grading of product

Writing the different levels for rubrics can be monotonous and painful, the templates do a lot of the work for you. It also helps you clarify in your own mind what you are exactly expecting from your students.

While Rubistar isn't necessarily used by students, it drives their work when completing projects. One might also have students create their own rubrics. It is important the user be knowledgeable in the basics of a good rubric prior to starting. It is certainly a huge help to have a variety of rubrics to use as a starting point or to combine various aspects of the rubrics to create a rubric for your class projects.

Rubistar is easy to use and you can find several rubrics created by other educators. If you know how to write a strong rubric that leads students to the desired outcome it can be a great tool. If you don't know how to do that then it could hinder student learning. This is really a teacher tool but there could be some student use aspects.