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essay rubrics for high school

Rubrics for High School English Language Arts

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Need a Rubric Right Now? 📚🎓

Are you an ELA teacher looking for reliable rubrics to streamline your grading process? You’ve come to the right blog!! 🌟 This comprehensive collection of rubrics for high school English Language Arts covers everything from essays and projects to presentations and creative assignments. Whether you’re teaching literary analysis, research skills, or creative writing, you’ll find both free and premium rubrics to suit your needs. 📝💡

I’ve tweaked and improved these assessment resources since I began teaching in 2011. I know they will help you assess student work more quickly and more consistently; PLUS, these rubrics will provide clear expectations for students as well. 💯 Dive into my list of rubrics tailored for English 11, English 12, AP Literature, and general (9-12) high school ELA classes. Save time, improve your grading efficiency, and provide valuable feedback to your students with these essential assessment tools. 🕒📈📣

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Essay Rubrics

  • Expository Essay Rubric (For Essays w/ Citations) — Perfect for cited literary argument essays/literary critical essays/ and text-based analysis essays!
  • Simple Cited Essay Rubric — Common Core Aligned
  • Five Paragraph Essay Rubric & Checklist
  • Timed Essay Rubric (For Timed Essays w/o Citations) –Great for AP Lit! Has the sophistication point! Works for English 11/12 as well 🙂
  • Poetry Explication Rubric (For Poetry Analysis Essays)
  • Persuasive Speech Rubric (for grading the oral performance)
  • English 11 and 12 APA Essay Rubric (Research + Persuasive Paper)
  • ACT Persuasive Writing Rubric — FREE!
  • College Essay Rubric and Prompts
  • Resume Rubric
  • Descriptive Writing Assignment & Rubric — FREE
  • Free Write Rubric — FREE
  • Book Talk Rubric

CER/Short Answer Rubrics

  • CER Paragraphs and/or Short Answers Rubric

Group Work Rubrics

  • Cooperative Learning/Teamwork Rubrics

MLA Rubrics

  • Comprehensive MLA Citation & Formatting Rubric/Checklist
  • Free MLA Citation & Proofreading Rubric

Project Rubrics

  • Creative Project Rubric — FREE!
  • Group Presentation Rubric / Group Work & Teamwork Rubric
  • College Research Presentation Rubric — FREE
  • Movie Rubric — FREE
  • Body Biography Rubric — FREE (not formatted)
  • Body Biography Assignment + Rubric Free Download

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essay rubrics for high school

Welcome to English with Mrs. Lamp , where I share teaching ideas, advice, and resources for 11th Grade American Literature, AP Lit, and High School ELA!

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Essay Rubric

Essay Rubric

About this printout

This rubric delineates specific expectations about an essay assignment to students and provides a means of assessing completed student essays.

Teaching with this printout

More ideas to try.

Grading rubrics can be of great benefit to both you and your students. For you, a rubric saves time and decreases subjectivity. Specific criteria are explicitly stated, facilitating the grading process and increasing your objectivity. For students, the use of grading rubrics helps them to meet or exceed expectations, to view the grading process as being “fair,” and to set goals for future learning. In order to help your students meet or exceed expectations of the assignment, be sure to discuss the rubric with your students when you assign an essay. It is helpful to show them examples of written pieces that meet and do not meet the expectations. As an added benefit, because the criteria are explicitly stated, the use of the rubric decreases the likelihood that students will argue about the grade they receive. The explicitness of the expectations helps students know exactly why they lost points on the assignment and aids them in setting goals for future improvement.

  • Routinely have students score peers’ essays using the rubric as the assessment tool. This increases their level of awareness of the traits that distinguish successful essays from those that fail to meet the criteria. Have peer editors use the Reviewer’s Comments section to add any praise, constructive criticism, or questions.
  • Alter some expectations or add additional traits on the rubric as needed. Students’ needs may necessitate making more rigorous criteria for advanced learners or less stringent guidelines for younger or special needs students. Furthermore, the content area for which the essay is written may require some alterations to the rubric. In social studies, for example, an essay about geographical landforms and their effect on the culture of a region might necessitate additional criteria about the use of specific terminology.
  • After you and your students have used the rubric, have them work in groups to make suggested alterations to the rubric to more precisely match their needs or the parameters of a particular writing assignment.
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