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Alice Keeler

How to Make a Rubric with Multiple Choice Grid in Google Forms

How to Make a Rubric with Multiple Choice Grid in Google Forms. Rubrics are great tools for evaluating student learning, Google Forms makes rubrics even better.
How to Make a Rubric with Multiple Choice Grid in Google Forms

While almost all of us use Google Forms, I think that the Multiple Choice Grid option is one of the lesser-used question types. There are many great reasons to use this type of question. It is a required question type if you are using Scheduler by Alice Keeler. A rubric is a great example of a grid that translates well to the Multiple Choice Grid option. You can fill out rubrics quickly using a Google Form and entering student names. This gives you all of the student rubric scores in one place. Click here for a sample rubric.

Multiple Choice Grid option in Google Forms

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Multiple Choice Grid

Creating a multiple choice grid question allows you to put multiple questions in one question. It matches up rows and columns with a grid of radio buttons.

Columns in Multiple Choice Grid

While the first thing you see in a Google Forms multiple choice grid question is “Rows”, I recommend you start with “Columns.” The columns are your ratings for the rubric. If you are using a 4 point rubric put something like 4-Meets standard, 3-Approaches Standard, 2-Below Standard, 1-Far Below Standard, and Missing. Since the columns are often used for the rating criteria you can not shuffle the order of the columns. Thus it is important to put the options in order. In a rubric I like to focus on student success and thus put the “Meets standard” first.

Multiple choice grid question with the columns showing 4-meets standard. 3-approaches standard. 2-below standard. 1-far below standard 0-missing

Rubrics are Not Percentages

Rubrics are great because they allow us to communicate how students met certain criteria or standards. It is important to remember, however, that a rubric score is NOT a percentage. Our grading criteria can not be A+, C, F, and really low F. One of the problems with a 100 point scale is that 60% of the scale is failure. Rubrics are supposed to help overcome that. Treating rubric scores as percentages is worse than the 100 point scale since the 76% to 99% range (the success range) is not available.

Please check out Dr. Thomas Guskey for more information on rubrics (and why we do NOT use exceeds standard).

Rows Are Criteria

What are you evaluating student work on? Put those criteria into the rows of the multiple-choice grid.

Rows of the multiple choice grid question contain the standards and criteria

Require a Response in Each Row

Optionally you can toggle on “Require a response in each row.” I generally leave this OFF for rubrics since sometimes for some reason I am not evaluating the criteria and want to leave it blank. If the person filling out the rubric is you

3 Dots

I hope a “snowman” of 3 dots makes you excited! This is the “More options” menu. Be sure to click on the 3 dots menu in the bottom right of your Google Forms questions. You can add a description to further clarify what you are evaluating.

3 dots menu options of description, limit to one response per column, and shuffle row order

For a rubric, it probably does not make sense to “Shuffle row order.” I also use the Multiple Choice Grid option to rank criteria such as “first choice”, “2nd choice”, etc… in that case, it makes sense to shuffle the row order so that people filling out the question are not all biased to the same top options. For rubrics, you probably want to leave that off. It will be harder to quickly fill out rubrics if you are not sure of the criteria order 🙂

Definitely do NOT limit to one response per column. Obviously, we hope that each student meets the top rating for each criterion.

Responses

The summary of responses will create a nifty chart. showing how students overall did on the criteria. This invaluable information can help you to make adjustments to what you teach. When I mark scores on a paper, or in Google Classroom, I get a general feeling of what students need to improve on, but using Google Forms I have the data to tell me for sure.

summary of responses bar chart from

Settings – Collect Email Addresses

If students are filling out the rubric to self-evaluate or peer evaluate I definitely want to collect email addresses. If you are the one filling out the Google Form, I recommend you go to the settings tab in Forms and TURN OFF the collects email option so you do not have to keep filling out (or collecting) your own email address.

Google Form Responses

Each row (criteria) is its own heading in Google Sheets. Meaning you will NOT see each student’s scores lumped up into a single cell but rather separated out nicely.

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