The SmartRubric Blog | SmartRubric

As exam season approaches, ensuring that you are providing accurate grades for mock exams and practice questions is really important. In this post, I'm going to explain the tools available to you in SmartRubric for setting up correctly weighted assessment objectives.  SmartRubric is a GIGO  system -- if you set up a good rubric, your marking experience will be smooth, accurate and painless. If you set up an awkward or incorrect rubric, you will not get the most out of SmartRubric. But don't worry -- I'm here to help! You can always  email caroline@smartrubric.com to get personal help.  Typically, exam specifications will give you guidance about how much each assessment objective is worth, but it isn't always clear how best to represent that in SmartRubric. I'm going to go through an example where some assessment objectives are weighted more heavily (worth more) than others. I'll break down the mark scheme, and then build it in SmartRubric. EXAMPLE: ...

The whole point of SmartRubric is to make feedback more targeted and helpful for students, and to make your marking workload smaller and more manageable. If you aren't customising rubrics you might be making your life and the lives of your darling students much more difficult and confusing. Don't worry, it's easy. I'll walk you through it. Here's a scenario for you: You are a KS3 teacher. Your department has a big 'master rubric', which contains all of the strands that are assessed in your subject, and all of the possible levels a student could be at for years 7, 8 and 9. That means, maybe, 12 or thirteen levels and ten strands or so per core skill on multiple tabs. It's colossal, but really  useful because it contextualises and maps out pretty much the entire curriculum. If you are sharing rubrics across a department, I highly recommend having one of these. Email me if you want help building one. So, the beauty of having one of these is that you,...

Your future self will thank you! Hello teacher friends! I hope your summer holidays have been both restful and restorative. Since it's the beginning of the year, now would be a great time to take advantage of the many organisational tools that SmartRubric offers to help you conquer your marking before it turns into a giant snowball/hamster wheel of doom. But first, some housekeeping: For those of you who are setting up SmartRubric for the first time, please check out our series of helpful tutorials and videos to help you make the most of your new SmartRubric account: How to  set up your account and start marking in less than 10 minutes  (<-- start with this one) How to set up your account - more detail and resources How to set up a class How to create a smart rubric How to feed back to students Once you have your account set up, you might be interested in some of the more advanced features of SmartRubric. You can find a list of relevant tutorials here ....

So, a few weeks ago I hinted in this post at some brand new features that come out of the ability to set up assessments for multiple classes at once. Well, here's one for you! This feature is available to teachers and administrators who belong to a department or school SmartRubric account (Sorry, solo teachers! You can upgrade for as little as 10 GBP/month ). The Departmental Spreadsheet will be a familiar beast to most of you, and, to be completely honest, it isn't something that SmartRubric has been able to replace... until now . Now that you can create linked assessments for a bunch of classes at once ( this post tells you how), you are probably  going to want to look at a nice, friendly, top level overview of how all of the students are doing on these linked assessments. You probably want something that looks like this: Just imagine   the efficiency. You, as department administrator, can set up all of your formal assessments for the whole year (if you want!)...

Set up your SmartRubric account, add a class full of students, build a custom rubric and create an assessment in less time than you think. I know that as a teacher, your time is really precious. Perhaps you've been putting off getting to grips with SmartRubric because you're swamped with work. I know how it goes. But, did you know that you can completely set up your account, create a custom rubric and start marking real student work in less than ten minutes? For a time investment of just ten minutes, you could be saving hours on time spent marking this term! I recorded a real-time video as I set up a brand new SmartRubric account. I made a rubric for an in-class English Literature assessment, but you could evaluate anything you like. All you need to get started is a SmartRubric account ( get one for free here ), a list of the students in the class that you would like to asses, and a clear idea of the skills or objectives for your assessment. If you haven't a...

If you are finding SmartRubric useful as an individual teacher, you might not realise how much more  useful it can be if you use it with a department or school. Broadly speaking, within a department or school, you can share student data and look at how students are progressing against key skills across the curriculum. It also gives you the ability to moderate work and communicate directly with your colleagues. This level is an area that we are excited to develop, and we are really interested to hear what you have to say about what would make SmartRubric most useful for you and your department. All you need to do is upgrade your account by going to your Billing Area  and select 'Administrator Subscription'. Decide how many members of your department you want, and create your subscription. You'll need to log out and back in again once you've done this. Once you have administrator rights (you will know because your navigation bar will turn teal and you get some extr...

In order to help you make the most of SmartRubric, we've given you the ability to import and export the rubrics that you (and others!) have made. If you would like to share a rubric: It's easy! All you need to do is make sure you have got your rubric the way you want it (don't forget the grade boundaries!), and click 'export' in the library. The file will automatically be saved in your downloads folder. It will have the file extension .srm, which just means that it's encoded and can only be opened by SmartRubric. You can share .srm files by email, post them online or share them on a memory stick. If you would like to import a rubric: If someone has sent you an .srm file or you found one online that you would like to use, it's easy to import it into SmartRubric. From anywhere in SmartRubric, just go to 'Rubrics' in the main menu and select 'Import'. When the modal pops up, click 'select' and find the file you wis...

To get the most out of SmartRubric, here is quick start guide to help you. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you would like some help. Set up your school Important: Add the Year Groups that your school teaches (this will enable you to add classes). You can also set up pastoral groups, such as form groups/homerooms or houses. This is optional and not necessary for quick setup. Customise the type of data that your school stores about students by selecting from the list. Update the school's address and other details. C...