| Course Subject: | Law |
| Student Level: | NA |
| Number of Students: | NA |
| Developed by: | Andrew Haile, Assistant Teaching Professor, Legal Skills in Social Context, School of Law |
What the Instructor Did
The instructor used Claude to develop a detailed grading rubric for evaluating student legal writing–specifically memoranda. Drawing on anonymized examples of past written feedback on student assignments, the instructor worked through a series of prompts with Claude to generate and iteratively refine a rubric grounded in his own grading priorities and criteria. The resulting rubric enables standardized feedback across student submissions.
Purpose
The purpose of the rubric is to streamline and standardize grading in courses, as this can be one of the most time-intensive aspects of legal education. Using Claude to generate a rubric based on the instructor’s own past feedback enabled the instructor to produce a grading tool that reflects individual faculty priorities rather than a generic template. The rubric was designed to enable more efficient grading and to generate more detailed and consistent feedback to students.
Assessment
The instructor evaluated the effectiveness of the Claude-generated rubric through direct use in grading student memoranda during the Fall 2025 semester. The rubric was assessed informally based on whether it captured the instructor’s grading priorities accurately and whether it made the grading process more efficient and consistent.
Faculty Reflections
The rubric itself has been very helpful in my grading so far this semester. Working through prompts with Claude allowed me to articulate criteria that I had been applying intuitively but had never written down in a structured way. This iterative process included uploading anonymized feedback, reviewing Claude’s draft, and refining it through follow-up prompts. Claude eventually produced a rubric that genuinely reflects how I evaluate student writing.
The same approach can be used to create rubrics tailored to other forms of assessments such as papers or exams. I think this approach has real potential to help many faculty, since grading tends to be one of the most onerous tasks in teaching, and different faculty have different approaches. A rubric created from a faculty member’s own feedback and priorities is far more useful than a generic one.
Step-by-Step Directions
| Step 1 | Gather anonymized examples of past feedback you have given on student writing. These may include marked-up memoranda, papers, or exam answers. Remove all student-identifying information before proceeding. |
| Step 2 | Remove personal identifiers and potentially metadata connected to the individual student. |
| Step 3 | Upload the anonymized feedback examples to Claude. Provide an initial prompt asking Claude to identify the recurring evaluative criteria reflected in your feedback. |
| Step 4 | Review Claude’s initial output. Work through a series of follow-up prompts to refine the rubric: adjust the criteria, reorder priorities, clarify language, and add any grading dimensions that the initial draft missed. |
| Step 5 | Produce a finalized rubric. Review the rubric against a sample of student work to confirm it captures your grading standards accurately. |
| Step 6 | Use the rubric in your grading. After using it on at least one assignment cycle, note any criteria that need adjustment and refine as needed. |
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