Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Instructor: Thomas Murray
Course: 95-280 Strategic Management and Implementation, Heinz College
Assessment: Task Description and Performance Rubric for Final Assignment

Purpose:

I had taught this course before, but I wasn’t comfortable with the assessments that I was using. The course topic is broad, and the course itself is only six weeks long. In general, I wanted to ensure that the assessments were appropriate for the topic, manageable for the students, and connected to the course goals. I focus here on the strategic proposal assignment, which is a group project and the final assignment in the course.

Implementation:

The strategic proposal assignment has several phases, and I created a rubric for each phase that articulates performance criteria in different categories and describes exemplary, competent, and developing performance in each category. I distributed the rubrics with the assignment guidelines so that students knew my expectations before they began working on the assignment. I reviewed and graded the assignments using the rubric.

Results:

Creating the rubric for this assignment confirmed for me that this assignment reflects the course goals. It has also made the grading process easier and has helped to address students’ grading complaints. The rubric has helped the students because the last three sets of this assignment have shown improvements.

Comments:

Developing the rubric was a sanity check on aligning the course content with the goals and assignments.

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