Grading student writing fairly and consistently is challenging. Grading student oral presentations fairly and consistently is downright scary. What if we don’t remember everything students said? How do we simultaneously listen carefully and jot down grading notes and think of good questions to ask them? Until recently, these and other similar nagging concerns kept me awake at night. As a lab instructor in the Biology Core Curriculum (Biocore) Program, a four-semester honors undergraduate biology sequence that is committed to improving students’ scientific reasoning, written, and oral communication skills, I wanted to be able to evaluate students’ oral performance as fairly as I did their writing.

Consistent, fair grading of student performance is a difficult but essential goal. For the last several years my colleague Janet Batzli and I have found rubrics to be an effective way to make our Biocore lab research paper expectations transparent to students while also providing our TAs with clear grading guidelines. Last summer it finally dawned on me that rubrics could be the answer to my oral-presentation grading nightmares. Veteran TAs Shana Lavin and Sara Peterson helped me to develop the oral presentation rubric shown on page four.

We used this rubric for the first time in Biocore 324 lab in fall 2006 and were very pleased with it for several reasons. First, creating the rubric forced us to reflect carefully on and clearly articulate our expectations for student oral PowerPoint presentations. We decided on five basic components to a good oral PowerPoint presentation: content, organization, teamwork (our lab students work in groups of three to four), visuals, and presentation mechanics. Second, we had to define criteria within each of these categories specific to key issues of scientific thinking. For example, in the content area, we focused on criteria such as developing a clear biological rationale and a complete, concise hypothesis statement. Third, we had to define the relative importance of these five components; we agreed that the first three components (content, organization, and teamwork) were more important than visuals and mechanics, because they were the strongest evidence of students’ understanding of scientific concepts and their efforts toward communicating them. The scores that teams earned on these first three components were thus weighted more heavily in terms of the overall presentation grade. Finally, we made the rubric available to students as they developed their slide shows, so there were far fewer student questions regarding our expectations. Research teams told us that they frequently referred to the rubric as they prepared their slides and practiced their oral presentations.

During the students’ 15-minute presentations, each of us (the TA, two undergrad TAs, and I) had the rubric in front of us while we listened. We made quick notes about the rating we gave for each component and often wrote cryptic comments to ourselves regarding questions/clarifications to ask each team during the five-minute question-answer session following each presentation. Immediately after all teams had presented, my TAs and I had a private round-table discussion of our individual component ratings and came to a consensus regarding the final grade for each presentation. When necessary, we would refer to the PowerPoint slides that students had posted online in our class My WebSpace folder.

I found that the component ratings assigned by my TAs often closely matched my own. When we had a difficult time deciding on a final grade, we would refer to the rubric to remind ourselves of the objective guidelines already in place. I felt much more confident that each final grade was appropriate, and TAs were better able to target precisely their written comments to help students improve. Oh, yes, and I’ve slept very well ever since!

To view the rubric, go to http://www.biocore.wisc.edu/biocore/writing_manual/writingman07/07presentationsF.html