How to Create a Rubric in Illuminate - Basic

Hey everyone, I've been receiving a lot of questions about creating rubrics in Illuminate, so I thought I'd go ahead and make this tutorial. Making rubrics is a fairly simply process, if you can make an assessment in Illuminate, you can make a rubric.

Creating an assessment: 

The first thing that you need to do is to create an assessment. You do this by clicking on Assessment on the black toolbar. From the dropdown menu, choose Create a New Assessment. On the next screen, you'll want to choose Manual Assessment. Before clicking Okay, you need to supply the number of questions that you want on your assessment, or in this case, the number of sections in your rubric. 

At this point, you're going to need to add the New Assessment Information. While you are only required to add a title to your assessment, there are a few other pieces of information that you will find useful, later on, if you include them now.

Make sure that you add the following:

1. Title
2. Academic Year
3. Subject
4. Grade Levels
5. Whether or not to show it in the student and parent portals.

The first four options simply make it easier for you to search for the assessment later on. I would also suggest that the first part of your title contain the school year that the rubric or assessment is used (2015-16) because when you sort the assessment titles by name, it sorts by numbers first.

The fifth piece of information decides whether or not students and parents will see the information in their Illuminate portal. If this is just for your information, you will want to click No, otherwise, just leave it alone.

On the next screen you will see your four questions (or sections of your rubric). The first thing you will need to do is to make sure to click the Rubric check box for each of the questions (sections on your rubric). Clicking the box tells Illuminate to look for numeric answers, if you leave it unchecked, the program will be looking for letters (A, B, C, D or T/F).

You also need to add the total number of points, and the value for what correct looks like. Most likely, these two numbers will be the same. In this example, each section of my rubric is worth a total of four points (4-Excellent, 3-Proficient, 2-Basic, 1-Not There Yet). The only time that you'd have different numbers in the two columns is if you have four points possible, but you want it to be worth more than four points in your gradebook, for instance if you put 4 in the correct box, but 8 in the points box, you're telling Illuminate that each section should be counted as doubled.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful for creating a basic rubric, I'll be following up this post with one that shows you how to add more information, and customization to your rubric. I will also show the different ways to enter student scores in your rubric.