Rubric

I took a class at NAU called "Assessment of Learning". Now and then it was interesting, but overall, it was lame. For one assignment we were supposed to write a rubric. I was so tired of all the professional-sounding buzzword-using schlock the professor wanted us to write that by the end of the semester I wrote this sort of smart-alecky wise-guy rubric. I think it's cool.

Rubric

There are 5 points possible. One point is earned for every question you answer correctly. If you answer all 5 questions right, you get 5 points. If you answer 4 questions right, you get 4 points. If you answer 3 questions right, you get 3 points. If you answer 2 questions right, you get 2 points. If you answer 1 question right, you get 1 point. If you answer 0 questions right, you get 0 points. Your object is to gain as many points as possible.

Why, you ask, are we to seek so earnestly after points? I answer: points are good because they are intrinsically good. That is, even if no one counts a point, earns a point, or even possesses knowledge of the existence of a point, the point still stands unaided, in all its glorious value. Indeed, the point is quite unaffected by the perception of others.

Maybe a personal anecdote will show you what I mean. In the 1980’s I was an impatient, undisciplined boy. I wasn’t doing well in school, my father couldn’t get me to do much around the farm; I was generally listless. One afternoon, while avoiding homework and chores, I went into town and loitered around a convenience store. I stepped inside, slowly selected a candy bar, and waited in line to purchase my chocolate. Just then, while standing there, my eye was caught by a strange, wondrous and new thing.

It was a tall shiny rectangular contraption with a flashing TV screen inside of it. I went towards it. When I looked closer I saw that it had several buttons and a place to insert coins, and written on the top of it was “Asteroid Blaster 5000!” Then it came to me. “A video game!” I thought. “This is what they call a video game!” I put in my dime and instantly I was in outer space, saving galaxies.

Within a short moment, I was enthralled.

I twisted the joystick to spin my spaceship, and I pushed the red button on top of the joystick to fire missiles into asteroids. Alien invaders in enemy spaceships came too, and I would blast them with a fury of white dots.

But after a few minutes of playing, I suddenly fell into a deep anguish. “What’s the use of blasting away these asteroids, anyway?” I thought. “More just keep coming, faster and bigger. No matter how many alien spaceships I destroy, more spaceships fly by and try to shoot me. Death is the only real ender of this game. And,” I thought, “if I were to die, the asteroids and spaceships would still be alive in the machine.”

But my disappointment grew deeper. As I looked around at the racks of beef jerky and cigarettes, I realized that Asteroid Blaster 5000! wasn’t real anyway. I was not in space after all. I was very much standing in a convenience store in my boring hometown, thinking I was in space, deluding myself into believing I was some sort of intergalactic hero.

I had been duped, and I wanted my dime back.

I was just about to go home and do farm work when I noticed a large number in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. I don’t remember the number exactly, but it was somewhere in the thousands or ten-thousands. The number kept changing, too. It was getting larger. Fascinating.

Then I noticed a correlation between the change in the number and the asteroids being destroyed. Every time I blew an asteroid away, the number increased. Upon further experimentation, I learned that if I blew up a small asteroid, I got 50 points. If I destroyed a medium asteroid, I got 100 points, and if I destroyed a large asteroid I got 300 points.

How could I have missed it before? Points! They were giving me points! The game was in fact not futile, I had not labored in vain, - I was actually being rewarded for destroying those asteroids!

Empowered by my discovery, I launched back into space. With the nose of my spaceship aimed squarely at the oncoming asteroids, I shot them with a renewed vigor and purpose. I squealed with delight as I watched the numbers climb higher and higher. I was earning points! With the passing of hours and the spending of dollars, my score reached into the hundred-thousands, and I was euphoric.

From that revelatory afternoon until this day, I know, as I know the sun shines, that whenever I expend my energy for points’ sake, I have not toiled in vain. Indeed, I would gladly waste away my life in the pursuit of those great numbers, those divine digits, points. And if at the end of my life I find myself having no offspring, no loved ones to care for me, no attendees at my funeral, and if I am reduced to slavery and toil in the most wretched of all wretched slime pits, with a jagged rock for my pillow and the cries of whipped toddlers for my lullaby, at least I will know that in my lifetime I accumulated a lot of points.

And this, my students, is why points are valuable.