A good rubric can help students understand what is expected of them and it can help teachers score students’ assignments consistently. Over the years I’ve tried a variety of tools for crafting rubrics. The first ones I created were done by hand on a photocopied grid (late 90’s at the University of Maine, Farmington) and in Word Perfect documents. These are the tools that I now recommend for generating rubrics.

The old, reliable. 
How long has Rubistar been around? Long enough that I was using it before I started this blog in 2007. Rubistar is a rubric creation tool offered by 4teachers.org. On Rubistar you can select from a variety of pre-made rubrics and modify them to your needs or you can use the pre-made rubrics as they are.

New, quick & easy.
Quick Rubric is a free tool for writing, editing, and printing rubrics. On Quick Rubric you can create a rubric that is tailored to your points/ scoring system, the quantity of descriptors that you need, and utilizes the exact language that you specify. You can save as many rubrics as you like in your free Quick Rubric account. You can copy and modify rubrics your account so that you don’t always have to start from scratch when creating a new assignment rubric.

For the Google Apps users.
Online Rubric is a Google Spreadsheets Add-on that enables to you create rubrics, enter scores, and email scores to students all from one place. Online Rubric provides very clear instructions for each step of the processes of creating a roster sheet, creating a rubric, and emailing grades to students.

Disclosure: Quick Rubric is owned by the same company that produces Storyboard That, an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com