Rubrics are an evidence-based tool for bringing structure, clarity, and fairness to evaluations for admissions, hiring, grading, fellowship and awards. Like all tools, though, how they are designed and put to use matters much for the outcomes that can be expected. As part of developing equity-minded selection systems, this workshop offers an opportunity to delve into best practices for developing rubrics, how to avoid symbolic adoption when implementing them, and ways to refine rubrics that may be already in use. Activities are designed to aid departments in ensuring alignment with both the current legal landscape and organizational values, and connect to other elements of selection processes such as the application. Participants are asked to bring existing rubrics for review, improvement, and discussion. Participants without an existing rubric will work to imagine what a rubric for their program can look like.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Through participating in this workshop, attendees will have the knowledge and skills to:
- Articulate the benefits of rubrics and distinguish them from other types of evaluation protocols
- Assess the quality of existing evaluation rubrics or develop one for the first time
- Ensure alignment of rubrics with the legal landscape and organizational values
- Anticipate and avoid symbolic adoption
- Connect their evaluation rubric to other elements of the selection system
FACILITATOR BIOS
Dr. Julie Posselt (she/her) is Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. Posselt is an expert on organizational behavior affecting access to and equity in higher education, especially in graduate education and STEM disciplines. She is PI and Director of the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium and Director of the Research Hub for the NSF-INCLUDES Alliance: Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN). Her most recent book is Equity in Science: Representation, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change in Graduate Education.
Dr. Damian O. Elias is an Associate Professor in the Departmental of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Elias’ research focuses on the mechanisms that guide animal behavior and how these mechanisms relate to behavioral adaptation and evolution. Elias received his PhD in 2005 from Cornell University in Neurobiology and Behavior. His work covers a variety of topics (communication, mate choice, species diversification) across animal systems (ranging from spiders to birds) and scales (ranging from physics to phylogenetics). By studying the diversity of animal behavior through multiple lenses, Elias’ work aims to explore both biological principles and how bias influences the study and interpretation of animal behavior. Elias is a California Academy of Sciences Fellow and Affiliated Faculty in the Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley.
This session is part of the Equitable Selection Systems track through the Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center, which advances equity in graduate education by conducting and translating research that is inspired by community needs, and offering high-quality, evidence-based professional development that provides faculty and administrators with tools and resources to create and sustain institutional change. Columbia is a member of the national Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, making additional resources available to community members.
