RubriCorp: A Dystopian Assessment Story
By: Jennie Young
Tags: Tech, Humor, Education, Higher Education, Satire

The year is 5020, and rubrics now control every aspect of human life. America itself is run by RubriCorp, a monopolistic mega-corporation topped only by Amazon Prime, which digitally warehouses and distributes all of RubriCorp’s rubrics. Rubrics are now used to evaluate every aspect of daily life, from the speeches of presidents to the lawn-mowing performances of suburbanites.

It is believed RubriCorp’s inception is rooted sometime during the early part of the 21st century, when university administrators first said things like, “Is this decision data-driven?” or “Can you quantify your students’ writing?” or “Is there a way to make assessment less subjective?”

These probably seemed like important questions at the time.

Human communication patterns were radically different in the pre-RubriCorp Era. For example, the simple question “How are you today?” could be answered by a literally infinite combination of words, rather than today’s standard likert scale of “Very good,” “Fine, but one or more aspects of my life need improvement,” or “Unacceptable / most aspects of my life do not meet basic expectations.”

Decision-making worked much differently, too. For example, people used to decide whom to marry based purely on feelings and on something they called “chemistry.” There’s evidence to suggest that people made all kinds of life decisions, both major and minor, without rubrics. The unearthed journal of a teenaged girl circa 2012 records that she bought something called a “prom dress” because it was “exactly what I wanted!” and because “it just looked like me!” We have no idea how she was able to quantify what she wanted or if the dress really looked like her, but we do know that this occurrence was not the anomaly of one random psychopath; apparently, people regularly made decisions without rubrics, all willy-nilly like a bunch of maniacs.

It appears that early rubrics were intended to be a guideline for making judgements about a limited number of things, almost all of them related to educational assessment. But with each generation, as people came to rely more and more upon rubrics and as rubrics bled from academia into industry and eventually to all aspects of existence, humans became less and less able to make any sort of determination without one.

Innovation has stalled out as well. Because so many generations of children have been taught to conform to rubrics, as a people we now struggle to conceive of novel ideas, products, and technologies. When today’s students are encouraged to create something new, they will look confused and begin to search frantically for a rubric. If their teachers seem less than thrilled with any particular performance, they will demand that any estimation of their work is immediately and solidly defended by a rubric. In the absence of rubrics they will sometimes become violent, on a scale from “appears easily frustrated” to “inflicts superficial wounds” to “murder/removal from classroom.” This could not have been our ancestors’ intentions, but it’s what’s happened.

Over time, the reliance on rubrics has actually changed our brains. Cognitive mapping shows that today’s children visualize all sensory data in a series of squares. When asked what breakfast cereal they’d like, for instance, rather than making a snap decision based purely upon hedonistic impulses, children will automatically mentally scroll through a grid of criteria that tabulates not only taste but nutritional content, caloric load, and percentage of organically-sourced ingredients.

While there are certainly benefits to such processes, there is growing concern that complete rubric-governance has lead to collective rigid thinking that not only squelches creativity but is actually making us stupider (RubriCorp is currently in development of a rubric that will help us to research this concern).

A recent case study, for example, documents the case of Ms. Roberta McGraw-Hill of Des Moines, Iowa, who received an “unsatisfactory” rating on the “Rubric for Childbirth Performance.” She challenged her score, claiming that child-bearing is a holistic experience and should be evaluated as such, and the currently-used analytic rubric that includes such descriptions as “maintained even breathing during strongest contractions” is not relevant to someone who delivers by C-section. “The baby came out fine and is healthy!” she reasoned, but her doctor looked confused. The physician, apparently, had become so consumed by the rubric that he seemed to have lost sight of its artifact, which in this case was a human baby.

There is evidence that at least a small group of academics tried to sound an alarm about this eventuality, screaming warnings into the void about the dangers of “viewing students as cogs in the wheel and their intellectual work as the objects produced by the System.” We have no idea today what this might have meant to our ancestors; metaphorical constructions are too complex to be factored into rubrics, so we simply don’t use them.

More research will be needed to fully grasp whether our lives under the power of RubriCorp are “excellent,” satisfactory,” or “unacceptable.”