Each criterion is linked to the students' proper interpretation of the features of the picture that accompanies the test item. Each is exclusively based on a specific task in a single performance test. But such criteria, from an instructional perspective, are essentially worthless. Teachers need evaluative criteria that capture the essential ingredients of the skill being measured, not the particular display of that skill applied to a specific task. Just as task-specific evaluative criteria render a rubric instructionally useless, so too do excessively general evaluative criteria.
Numerous rubrics have criteria so amorphous they are almost laughable.
Many commercially published rubrics provide several qualitative levels so that teachers can ostensibly distinguish among students' performances. A second, lower level of response is described in slightly less positive terms, and so on. In essence, these overly general criteria allow both teachers and students to conclude that really good student responses to the task are, well, really good. Many rubrics now being billed as instructionally useful provide teachers and students with absolutely no cues about what is genuinely significant in a student's response, and they offer teachers no guidance on the key features of the tested skill. If we want rubrics to make a difference in classroom instruction, we need to create rubrics that teachers will use.