How are open response assessments graded?

You may have to wait for your grade

When you submit a response to an ORA, your submission may be reviewed and graded by:

• yourself. This is called the assess your response step. You'll receive your self-assessment score as soon as you assess yourself.
• your peers in the course. This is called the assess peers step. You will be required to review your peers' submissions, and you might have to wait a while for a grade from your peers.
• your instructors. This is called the staff grade step. You might have to wait a while for a grade from course staff.

Note: Course staff can grade your ORA if you're waiting on peer assessments. To request that staff manually grade your ORA, you should reach out to course staff through the course discussion forum.

About the rubric

Grading for every type of assessment step in an ORA assignment is done by comparing each response against the same set of guidelines, called a rubric. Every open response assessment has a rubric provided by the course team.

A rubric consists of several criteria and a set of options for each criterion.

Criteria

Each criterion describes characteristics that a response should have.

For example, "Determine if there is a unifying theme or main idea" or "Assess the content of the submission" are possible criteria for assessing a response.

Options

Each criterion has options which describe how well each response satisfies the criterion. The options are usually a range of ratings, with details to help you decide the rating, and an associated point value.

For example, this table shows the options for the criterion "Determine if there is a unifying theme or main idea."

When you assess a response, you evaluate the response, and for each criterion, select the option that best describes how well the response met that criterion.