Rubrics - The New Blackboard Function

My college upgraded our Blackboard software over the Thanksgiving holiday.  For those of you not familiar with Blackboard, it is a learning management system that is used to facilitate student access to online course materials, on-line quizzes and tests, and assignment submissions. One of the new features in this upgrade was grading rubrics.  I have been waiting for rubrics for some time now.  Before the merged WebCT/Blackboard software product, we used WebCT and this software included support for grading rubrics.  However, the migration to Blackboard resulted in a loss of these rubrics (Blackboard did not support rubrics) but now Blackboard has finally included this functionality in their software and I have access to rubrics again.

I updated my assignments for the remainder of the semester to use these rubrics.  After applying these rubrics to my assignments I have some opinions about Blackboard's first attempt at grading rubrics.  First of all, I was very impressed with Blackboard's first attempt at grading rubrics.  They had obviously learned from WebCT rubrics.  The rubrics allow the instructor to use single point values, point ranges, or percentage of points.  The rubrics are able to be modified to support as many rows (criteria) or columns (levels of achievement) as well as the individual criteria.  Grading is made easy by simply clicking on the appropriate cell in the rubric and selecting the points.  The rubric also supports comments for each evaluation cell in the rubric as well as summary comments below the rubric.

While there is much to like about this new function.  There are still some improvements I would like to see.  First of all, there is not an option to add descriptions to the criteria so I'm not able to describe what I'm looking for as part of each evaluation criteria.  Secondly, the rubrics don't automatically populate the total points for the assignment.  The rubrics tally the points and display the total but this total is not added to the points cell in the assignment.  I would like to see this total added with the ability to override the total.

This is an awfully long post for a discussion on the new grading rubrics but this is a big deal for me since I have been waiting for so long for this functionality to return.  I'm happy with the new function but there is still room for improvement.