That is, a student's aptitude on a task is determined by matching performance against a set of criteria to determine the degree to which the student's performance meets the criteria for the task rather than by comparing the student's performance against that of another student. To measure student performance against a pre-determined set of criteria, a rubric, or scoring scale, is typically created which contains the essential criteria for the task and appropriate levels of performance for each criterion. Each rubric has at least two criteria and at least two levels of performance for each criterion.
Criteria are characteristics of good performance on a task, such as . . . .
For each criterion, the evaluator applying the rubric can determine to what degree the student has met the criterion, i.e., the level of performance. A rubric might contain two or five or eight criteria or more.