Rubric

Research

A grading chart that breaks an assignment into named criteria (e.g. argument, evidence, structure) with descriptors at each performance level.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — rubric merriam-webster.com accessed 23 September 2026

Merriam-Webster records the modern sense, “a grading guide with specific criteria for academic work”, alongside older ones: an authoritative rule, a heading, a category. The etymology is the pleasing part — from Latin rubrica, from ruber, red, because scribes wrote headings and instructions in red ink to set them off from the black body text, the same practice that gives us “red-letter day”. First recorded in the fourteenth century. A rubric was literally the instruction in the margin before it was the marking scheme.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. The research usage above is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).