Why the Rubric Generation Won’t Be Ready for Work

• When students are trained to define success by how well they check the boxes of a rubric, they’ll struggle when success is undefined—precisely the condition they’ll face in the workplace.
• Rubrics reduce grading disputes but unintentionally teach dependency, discourage the development of judgment, and amplify discomfort with ambiguity.
• Educators can counter this trend by designing assignments that require students to navigate tradeoffs, determine their own criteria for excellence, and learn from uncertainty rather than avoid it.

 
I recently held a help session for MBA students working on a term paper. The assignment was open-ended by design, asking students to develop and defend an argument about how the leadership at an existing organization could best address an emerging opportunity.

During this session, I expected the students to ask me questions about framing their arguments, about evidence, and about how to handle counterarguments. I was prepared to discuss the difference between simple description and the type of analysis expected from an MBA student. But instead, not a single one of their questions was substantive.

Rather than discussing how to write thoughtful, well-reasoned papers, I fielded a steady stream of inquiries about page counts, citation formats, margin widths, line spacing, and whether headings were required. I had already explained that if I had a specific requirement, I would share it. But these students could not imagine an assignment without a rubric specifying every such detail. Apparently, the absence of prescribed minutiae felt to them less like freedom and more like a setup for failure.

That session has stayed with me because it revealed something I had not fully appreciated: We have trained students to optimize for known criteria rather than to think about ill-defined problems. Detailed rubrics have become so ubiquitous, from middle school through graduate education, that many students now struggle to conceive of work that is not defined by one. They have learned that success means checking boxes and that ambiguity is a design flaw to be reported to the instructor.

Rubrics rose to prominence for defensible reasons. They offered educators a way to objectify grading by making it more transparent and less vulnerable to accusations of favoritism. These are worthy goals, and rubrics achieve them reasonably well.

But there has been an unfortunate side effect: In teaching students to rely on explicit criteria, we have trained them to look for crutches. Though the rubric is a tool for clarifying expectations, it also creates a dependency so that students now struggle to function without one.

The Inability to Face Ambiguity

It is easy to imagine how this dependency reveals itself almost immediately after students graduate from college. Their collision with ambiguity likely begins with the first professional assignment.

For instance, a manager might ask a new analyst to put together a deck on a potential acquisition target. What critical questions will come to the new employee’s mind? How many slides should the deck contain? Should it have pictures? What level of detail is required? Or a young associate might be asked to brief a senior partner before a client meeting. The associate will wonder, what does the partner need to know? What information can be skipped? How much context is too much? These are judgment calls, and no one will specify the criteria in advance.

The new employee who has spent 16 or more years in educational environments where rubrics made expectations explicit now faces a work environment where these expectations are rarely made explicit. The boss who assigns a project is not withholding the rubric to be difficult. There is no rubric. It’s the task of employees to discern what good looks like, produce it, and learn from the feedback when they miss the mark.

Rubric-trained professionals reach for familiar handholds—a policy to cite, a process to follow. An external source must validate the decision before they feel authorized to make it.

For students who have been trained to ask, “What exactly do you want?” this reality feels as if they are being set up to fail. They do not yet understand that figuring out what is wanted is the job.

As their careers progress, the ambiguity only deepens. There is no rubric for telling a long-tenured employee that the role is being eliminated. No grading criteria exist for deciding whether to push back on a client who is difficult but profitable. No clear guidelines cover the moment when a team is looking for direction, and the new hire has no idea what to do next.

Rubric-trained professionals encounter these moments and reach for familiar handholds. They look first for a policy to cite, then for a process to follow. Failing that, they seek consensus, as though sufficient agreement among colleagues might substitute for the judgment they are reluctant to exercise. And when consensus proves elusive, they escalate the decision to someone who might tell them what to do. The pattern reveals itself through its consistency: An external source must validate the decision before they feel authorized to make it.

This shows up in ways that are immediately recognizable to anyone who has managed young professionals. There is the reflexive “What would you like me to do?” question asked in situations where the whole point is for them to figure out what should be done. There is discomfort with any decision that cannot be fully justified by explicit criteria, as though a leader’s job is to construct an airtight case rather than to exercise judgment in conditions of uncertainty.

In other words, activity is conflated with progress, because activities can be checked off. But progress toward ambiguous goals cannot be measured so cleanly.

The Added Challenge of Competing Interests

Such ambiguity becomes even more difficult for these graduates to navigate when their decisions affect multiple stakeholders with legitimate but competing interests. A rubric works precisely because it specifies how different criteria will be weighted, but leadership situations rarely come with such specifications. The affected employee has needs. The team has needs. The organization has needs. Customers, shareholders, and communities have needs. Stakeholder needs conflict, and no formula exists to resolve them.

Leaders must decide how to weight each consideration, own that decision, and live with the knowledge that other reasonable people might have weighed them differently. For someone trained to believe that correct answers exist and can be specified in advance, this is not merely uncomfortable; it is deeply unsettling. It is disorienting in a way that can produce paralysis.

Organizations need people who can act in the absence of complete information and make calls when the data is ambiguous. When leaders cannot do this, they compensate in ways that are almost always destructive. Some become obsessive information gatherers, believing that enough analysis will eventually produce the certainty they crave. Others become deferential to whoever in the room seems most confident, regardless of whether that confidence is warranted.

Still others retreat into process, substituting procedural compliance for the judgment they cannot bring themselves to exercise. None of these compensations serves the organization well, and all of them trace back to the same source: a development process that treated ambiguity as a problem to be eliminated rather than a condition to be mastered.

Every time we hand students a rubric, we spare them discomfort. Every time we spare them that discomfort, we deny them the repetition they need.

Judgment cannot be decomposed into criteria and assessed on a four-point scale. A person develops this attribute through gaining experience with ambiguity, through making decisions with incomplete information, through being wrong and sitting with the consequences. Every time we hand students a rubric, we spare them that discomfort. Every time we spare them that discomfort, we deny them the repetition they need.

This is not a generational failing. Twenty-somethings have the same raw capability as their predecessors, but they have far fewer opportunities to develop the pattern recognition that allows experienced leaders to read a situation and know what it demands. We use rubrics to fill the space where that development should have occurred.

How We Can Get Beyond the Rubric

If rubrics are part of the problem, the question is how we should replace them. Fortunately, there are alternatives. For instance, I now ask students to submit memos proposing the criteria by which their final project should be evaluated before they begin working on it. They must think through what excellence looks like for this type of deliverable. I can ask questions or push back, but the initial thinking is theirs.

I expect their discomfort will be palpable, and that their first question invariably will be some version of “But what do you actually want?” Learning to answer that question for themselves is going to be the assignment beneath the assignment. With that in mind, I and other instructors might also adopt the following approaches:

• Give students several samples of the type of work they will be producing, varying in quality but unlabeled, and ask them to rank the samples and articulate what distinguishes the best from the rest. The grading criteria will emerge from their analysis rather than from a handout.
• Frame an assignment as a deliverable for a demanding executive who has asked for a recommendation but has not specified length, format, or level of detail. Part of the work is figuring out what someone in that role would find valuable.
• Require students to submit their work alongside a memo explaining what they were trying to achieve, what tradeoffs they navigated, and how they would evaluate their own success.

Each of these approaches shares a common feature: The instructor has deliberately withheld something that students have been trained to expect, and the learning happens in that gap.

The rubric has become so deeply ingrained in our curricula and assessments, I do not know whether we can reverse course. The forces that created rubric culture remain present. When instructors withdraw that structure, student complaints will likely be immediate, while the benefits of productive struggle will be delayed.

But I find myself increasingly unwilling to keep handing out specifications for work that should require students to determine for themselves what excellence looks like. The discomfort this creates is real, but our profession has long contended that learning is uncomfortable. At a time when employers need leaders who can handle ambiguity and manage complexity, such “uncomfortable” learning will be exactly what our students need.