Grading with a rubric in Google Docs: paste it as a table, total it, comment on each row

1 Why put the rubric inside the document

When students hand in writing as a Google Doc, the rubric is most useful right there with the work. The student scrolls down from their essay to the table and sees which cell you shaded in each row, the score beside it, and a comment that points back to a line in their own writing. Nothing to download, nothing to match up later.

It also saves you from retyping. A rubric typed by hand into Docs takes a long time and comes out uneven. A rubric pasted as a table arrives with every cell in place, borders on, ready to mark.

This guide covers the document itself. Google Classroom also has a rubric feature of its own inside an assignment, which is a different tool with its own steps. If your school uses that, you can still copy our criteria from a rubric page into it by hand. Everything below assumes you are marking in the document.

2 Getting the rubric into Docs as a real table

Both our rubric pages and the rubric maker have a copy button that puts a real table on the clipboard, with borders and a heading, so it pastes into Google Docs as a table rather than a block of text.

1. From a premade rubric: open it from Rubrics for every assignment, go to your grade band, and press Copy for Google Docs. The button says "Copied" for a moment.
2. From the maker: build or change your rubric in the rubric maker and press Copy as a table.
3. In Google Docs: put the cursor where you want the rubric, usually at the very end of the student's work, and paste with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) or Edit, then Paste.
4. Check the result: you should see the rubric's title as a heading, then a bordered table with the criteria down the left and the levels across the top.

If you paste and get lines of text with gaps instead of a table, one of two things happened. You may have pasted without formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V or Cmd+Shift+V), which drops the table. Or your browser only copied plain text, which some older browsers do. In that case, paste into a blank Google Sheet first, where the tab-separated text lands in columns, then copy those cells and paste them into Docs. Docs asks whether to link the table to the spreadsheet; choose to paste it unlinked.

3 What the pasted table holds

It helps to know exactly what arrives, so you can mark it quickly. For an analytic rubric with scoring on, the table has:

• A header row: Criteria, then each level with its points in parentheses, such as Exceeds (4), Meets (3), Approaching (2) and Beginning (1), then Score.
• One row per criterion: the criterion's name, a description in every level's cell, and a score cell that reads "/ 4". A row that counts twice shows (×2) after its name and "/ 8" in its score cell.
• A Total row at the bottom, blank across the levels, with the rubric's maximum in the last cell, such as "/ 24".

A single-point rubric pastes as three columns instead: Areas for growth, Criteria and Evidence of going beyond. The middle column holds each criterion's name and its standard; the side columns are empty for your notes.

A K–2 rubric copied from its band has no score column and no total row, because those rubrics are scored without points by default. The header shows the level names alone (Wow!, Yes, Not yet), with no numbers in front of young students. If you turned the score column off in the maker for an older band, the copy leaves it off too.

4 Making it fit and staying readable

A four-level rubric is wide. In a portrait document the cells get narrow and the text wraps into tall rows. A few small fixes keep it readable.

• Turn the page sideways if the whole document can be. File, then Page setup, then Landscape. This changes every page, so it suits a rubric-only document more than an essay.
• Narrow the Criteria column by dragging its right border, which gives the level columns more room.
• Shrink the table text by selecting the table and lowering the font size by a point or two.
• Cut rows you won't use. Right-click a row and choose to delete it. Four or five criteria are plenty for most assignments.
• Start it on a new page with Insert, then Break, then Page break, so the rubric isn't split across a page and the essay above it stays clean.

It is faster to fix length in the maker than in thirty documents. If a cell is long, the rubric maker tells you it will print small, which is a good sign it will also wrap badly in Docs. Shorten it there, copy again, and every paste afterward is tidy.

5 Marking a level in each row and filling in the total

Pick one way to mark the level you chose and use it for every student, so they know what to look for.

• Shade the cell. Click in the cell, then open Format, Table, Table properties and pick a cell background color. A light color keeps the text readable when printed.
• Or bold the text of the chosen cell, which shows up even when printed in black and white.
• Or type an X at the start of the cell, which is quickest and survives any copy or export.

Then type the points into each row's score cell, in front of the slash: "3 / 4". For a row that counts twice, double the level's points: a Meets (3) on a (×2) row is "6 / 8".

Docs tables don't add up numbers for you. There are no formulas in a Docs table, so the total line is yours to fill in. Add the score column and type the sum in the Total row: "19 / 24". If you report percentages, divide and round it yourself, or keep a small spreadsheet of totals beside your grade book.

6 A comment per row

A shaded cell says where the work is. A comment says what to do about it. One short comment per row, attached to the cell you marked, gives the student a next step for each criterion without writing an essay of your own.

1. Select a word or two in the cell you marked.
2. Add a comment with Insert, then Comment, or Ctrl+Alt+M (Cmd+Option+M on a Mac).
3. Write one sentence that names something in their work, then one step to move up a level.
4. Point to the place if it helps: select the sentence in their essay that shows it and comment there instead, starting with the row's name.

Keep the sentences parallel to the rubric's own words, so the student can see the link. For a 3–5 "Reasons and facts" row marked Meets, that might be: "You gave two reasons. Back the second one with a fact from your notes to reach Exceeds."

Comments live in the margin of the document, beside the work. If you want the feedback inside the rubric itself, so it stays with the table wherever it goes, type it into an extra row instead. Right-click the last criterion row, choose to insert a row below, write "Next step" in its first cell, and put your one sentence in the cell beside it. Some teachers do both: a margin comment on each row while marking, then a single typed next step at the bottom.

What to sayYour rubric is at the bottom of your document. Each row has one shaded box and one comment. Read the comments first, pick one, and fix that before anything else.

7 Reusing it for the whole class

Paste once, reuse many times. A few habits make the second paper as fast as the thirtieth.

• Keep a blank rubric document. Paste the rubric into its own Google Doc and leave it unmarked. Copy the table from there each time, or use File, then Make a copy for each new student file you set up.
• Attach it with the assignment. If you hand out the assignment as a Google Doc, put the rubric at the bottom before you share it. In Google Classroom, choosing to make a copy for each student gives every student their own copy, rubric included.
• Keep the link to your rubric. In the maker, the address in the bar holds the whole rubric after the # sign, which browsers don't send to a server. Bookmark it and you can copy the same table again next year.
• Keep names out of the maker. The rubric is the same for everyone and never needs a student's name. Their name is already on their own document.

If you mark on paper for some assignments, the same rubric prints on one landscape page from the maker or the rubric page, with a name line, a total line and a comments line, so paper and digital marking can use exactly the same words.