evaluation-rubrics

# Evaluation Rubrics

## Table of Contents
- [Purpose](#purpose)
- [When to Use](#when-to-use)
- [What Is It?](#what-is-it)
- [Workflow](#workflow)
- [Common Patterns](#common-patterns)
- [Guardrails](#guardrails)
- [Quick Reference](#quick-reference)

## Purpose

Evaluation Rubrics provide explicit criteria and performance scales to assess quality consistently, fairly, and transparently. This skill guides you through rubric design—from identifying meaningful criteria to writing clear performance descriptors—to enable objective evaluation, reduce bias, align teams on standards, and give actionable feedback.

## When to Use

Use this skill when:

- **Quality assessment**: Code reviews, design critiques, writing evaluation, product launches, academic grading
- **Competitive evaluation**: Vendor selection, hiring candidates, grant proposals, pitch competitions, award judging
- **Progress tracking**: Sprint reviews, skill assessments, training completion, certification exams
- **Standardization**: Multiple reviewers need to score consistently (inter-rater reliability), reduce subjective bias
- **Feedback delivery**: Provide clear, actionable feedback tied to specific criteria (not just "good" or "needs work")
- **Threshold setting**: Define minimum acceptable quality (e.g., "must score ≥3/5 on all criteria to pass")
- **Process improvement**: Identify systematic weaknesses (many submissions score low on same criterion → need better guidance)

Trigger phrases: "rubric", "scoring criteria", "evaluation framework", "quality standards", "how do we grade this", "what does good look like", "consistent assessment", "inter-rater reliability"

## What Is It?

An evaluation rubric is a structured scoring tool with:
- **Criteria**: What dimensions of quality are being assessed (e.g., clarity, completeness, originality)
- **Scale**: Numeric or qualitative levels (e.g., 1-5, Novice-Expert, Below/Meets/Exceeds)
- **Descriptors**: Explicit descriptions of what each level looks like fo