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How to Create Your Own Grading Rubric for High School (Printable)

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Grading Rubric

Grading a high school writing project can be more than a little confusing. Outside of simple grammar problems, there are a lot of different things to look for in an essay. A grading rubric is an invaluable assessment tool that gives you objective standards to assess your child’s writing. Teacher’s editions for BJU Press writing and grammar textbooks do provide general rubrics for all high school writing projects, but you may have other more specific goals for your student’s writing, such as

  • strong verb usage,
  • greater sentence variety,
  • natural sentence flow, and
  • avoiding passive voice.

Your child might benefit from a rubric specifically designed for him that focuses on what he struggles with in his writing. Being able to create your own grading rubric gives you control over what is emphasized in each assignment.

For example, your ninth-grade student has difficulty with sentence variety even though he has a good vocabulary. You’d like him to use his personal experience essay in Writing & Grammar 9 to practice before he writes his research essay, but the suggested rubric is designed to evenly assess a variety of different concepts, including sentence variety. You would like to change the rubric so that sentence variety is worth more points. Though you could switch out a few categories, you’d prefer to use this assignment to emphasize only a few ideas.

Printable Rubric

How do you create your own rubric so that you can focus specifically on the few ideas your child struggles with?

Creating a Grading Rubric

Rubrics follow one simple rule: the more general the rubric, the more subjective the grading will be. But the opposite is also true: the more specific and detailed your rubric, the more objective and straightforward the grading will be.

While it may seem easier (and faster) to make a grading rubric with three categories worth seven points each for a twenty-one point assignment, you might get stuck if you try to grade with that rubric alone.

You can get a little bit further by separating the number of points and assigning them to a rating. An excellent paper might get seven points, while an average paper might get four or five.

Download these grading rubric templates for ideas on how you might make your rubric more specific and detailed.

But how can you decide what makes an excellent paper excellent? Adding descriptions to the values of each category that separate good from excellent turns subjective grading into objective grading. Additionally, the descriptions will give you something to point to if your child questions his grade, and they give your child something to aim for as he’s writing. If he keeps in mind what you’ve described as excellent as he’s completing the project, he’s more likely to achieve it.

So for your ninth-grade student, you could lay out your rubric like this:

Alternate Rubric sample

This sample rubric is a customized version of the same rubrics you’ll find in all Writing & Grammar courses. See more ninth-grade writing assignments and their rubrics in the Writing & Grammar 9 Teacher’s Edition.

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A Look Inside Algebra 2

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Algebra 2 Student Text

If you’re like me, you like to get a good look at a product before you buy it and certainly before you trust it to help educate your children. To make that easier for you, we recently filmed a video in which I review some of the features of the latest edition of our Algebra 2 Student Text.

Algebra 2 is new, and as someone who spends a lot of time working in math textbooks, I was really impressed with these materials. Even if you don’t have a high school math student, you should take five minutes to watch this video. It gives a good overview of how we structure our math program and how the BJU Press curriculum as a whole can help you build your student’s biblical worldview.

Check out the video below!

What’s the Best Thanksgiving Harvest?

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All right, we admit it.

For most of us, the bounty of the harvest we celebrate in November comes from the grocery store. The Pilgrims would never recognize our “harvest”—canned, prepackaged, pasteurized, and processed—as bearing any resemblance to theirs.

Not long before their harvest made it onto the table, it was either still growing or still flying around in the woods. Their harvest was the culmination of months of ceaseless prayer, backbreaking labor, and skillful hunting.

Does that mean our “harvest” has any less value than theirs did? Not at all! We pray too (for the regular paycheck), labor (to make the most of our grocery money), and skillfully hunt (for the best bargains).

Remember, though, that God provided for the Pilgrims’ needs exactly what was most appropriate to their time and place. Can you imagine gifts of food from Massasoit and his braves containing things like refrigerated pie crusts and prepackaged stuffing? As resourceful as those first settlers were, they probably wouldn’t have known what to do with such gifts! God evidenced His goodness to the Pilgrims with gifts they could use.

pumpkin pie

It’s easy to forget in today’s environment of “have it all” that everything we have is intended by God to remind us of His goodness. And the plain truth is that we would never be able to make use of “all” even if we tried. (Granted, some of us would prefer to learn that lesson by experience!) But just as with the Pilgrims, God provides for our needs in the ways that are most fitting to our times and places.

So while we want to take the best possible care of our bodies by eating healthful food, sometimes our most pressing need is for quality time with our families. And if that means buying a prebaked pumpkin pie instead of making it from scratch or using instant mashed potatoes instead of homegrown ones, does that make our harvest any less real, valuable, or commendable than the Pilgrims’ first? Not at all! We have an even better harvest—one they would gladly have shared.

By the time the little colony at Plymouth was ready to celebrate its first harvest, it had lost almost half the original members to sickness and hardship. The harvest we celebrate when we gather together consists not so much of the food on the table as of the people around it. The young people we do our best to rear for God’s glory, the elders we respect for their wisdom and experience, the family members of various ages who all have their part in shaping our lives—these loved ones are the bountiful harvest of God’s goodness in our lives.

So whether your Thanksgiving table holds little or lots and whether it’s fresh from the outdoors or fresh from a package, remember this: Far more important than the quality or quantity of the food on the table are the loved ones it’s shared with.

May you find His abundance in your life to be far beyond what you can ask or think this Thanksgiving season!

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Writing and Grammar—Two Halves of One Whole

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For a busy parent, with everything that has to be completed in one homeschool day, teaching writing and grammar is a lot of work. It might seem to make more sense for you to handle these two related subjects as separate classes, or to spend one semester on grammar and the next on writing. So why does BJU Press put them together in the curriculum? Because writing and grammar are two halves of the same whole. Studying grammar helps your child become a better writer, while studying writing helps your child understand grammar. Here are a few reasons why.

Writing and Grammar—Two Halves of One Whole

  • Writing Skills and Grammar Skills

Writing assignments give your child a place to apply the grammar skills he’s just learned. It’s easy for a student to recognize and fix a problem he’s just learned about when looking at a list of sentences that follow a certain formula. The real test of understanding is expecting him to recognize and correct the problem in his own writing. But the reverse is also true—grammar skills improve writing. Writers need a certain level of grammatical understanding in order to be able to communicate effectively. For example, punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence entirely, as in the old joke about the trigger-happy panda that “eats, shoots and leaves.”

  • Analytical and Conceptual

People tend to be either analytical or conceptual. Grammar is an analytical skill, and children who favor logical processes tend to do well with grammar. On the other hand, writing is highly conceptual. There are fewer hard-and-fast rules for writing, and children who tend to be conceptual thinkers are likely to succeed in writing. Studying writing and grammar together gives both kinds of thinkers opportunities to use their strengths and improve their weaknesses.

  • Objective and Subjective

Since  writing is so conceptual, it can also be frustratingly subjective to assess, but this subjectivity leaves room for leniency in grading. When I was teaching writing, I would often ask myself whether lack of sentence variety or overuse of weak verbs really deserved a lower grade even though everything else was well done. But you know your own child’s strengths and weaknesses. If your child enjoys writing but doesn’t excel at spelling or grammar (the objective part), you can choose to value the writing section (the subjective part) of the rubric over the grammar section. If your child does well grammatically but doesn’t write as well, then you can choose to emphasize the grammar section of the rubric. This gives you the flexibility to evaluate your child based on his strengths rather than his weaknesses.

At BJU Press, we teach writing and grammar together all the way from grade 2 through grade 12. Check out our whole line of English-Writing and Grammar textbooks!

My Wife’s Teacher’s Aide

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My wife is doing a tremendous job in her first year of homeschooling. She is a fantastic planner and with some regularity is able to get our family ahead in covering the material. But homeschool is a family effort. So instead of just providing funds for the curriculum materials, I have decided to be my wife’s teacher’s aide.

My Wife's Teacher's Aide

In a traditional school setting, a teacher’s aide does menial tasks for the teacher. Lots of tasks—like stuffing papers into folders and grading worksheets—are things anyone can do and don’t require much evaluation. They just take time.

I’ve tried to support my wife by doing these types of tasks for her. When she had to organize manipulatives for the math program, I pitched in. Also, I usually do the daily grading of my daughter’s worksheets. It takes about ten to fifteen minutes of my time. Each of these tasks is small, but the reasons I do them are important.

Here are three motivations I have for choosing to serve as my wife’s teacher’s aide.

  • Loving my wife: The Lord commands me to love my wife as I love myself. Pitching in at the end of the day is one small way for me to show her I love her. I don’t want her to have to stay up fifteen minutes later or give up some personal time to grade these papers. When it comes down to it, I wish I could do more for her.
  • Seeing my child’s progress: It’s great to see how my daughter is progressing and what she’s learning. When she does great work, I have the opportunity to praise her. Sometimes, when she’s careless, I can challenge her to do better. I’ve seen her respond to praise and my challenges to do better. Her work keeps getting better.
  • Supporting our homeschool: Homeschooling allows our family to provide our children a Christian education, which is one of the most important gifts we can give them. I don’t want to stand on the sidelines of this journey of learning my children are on. Being my wife’s teacher’s aide allows me to actively support homeschooling on an everyday basis.

I enjoy being a teacher’s aide because of the ways it enables me to support my wife and children. I would encourage homeschool dads to consider similar ways they could get involved in the day-to-day homeschooling routine.

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