Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility

VALUE Rubrics

As part of the AAC&U VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) project, expert teams gathered, analyzed, synthesized, and then drafted institutional-level rubrics for fifteen of the AAC&U Essential Learning Outcomes. The resulting VALUE rubrics identify ascending levels of accomplishment and are designed to be used to gauge progress over the course of a students’ educational career. The rubrics reflect faculty expectations for essential learning from across the country, irrespective of type of institution, mission, size, or location.

The rubric development teams relied on existing campus rubrics when available and the rubrics contain the most common and broadly shared criteria for judging the quality of student work in a particular outcome area. The VALUE rubrics were tested and revised extensively with the help of more than 100 campuses.

Rubrics were developed for four key personal and social responsibility outcomes:

Civic knowledge and engagement—local and global
Intercultural knowledge and competence
Ethical reasoning
Foundations and skills for lifelong learning

Additionally, rubrics were developed in the following related outcome areas:

Inquiry and analysis
Critical thinking
Creative thinking
Written communication
Oral communication
Reading
Quantitative literacy
Information literacy
Teamwork
Problem solving
Integrative learning

Users can complete a one-time, short survey to access the VALUE rubrics, which can be downloaded as PDFs.