Opening Manage Rubrics

From any course dashboard, open Manage Rubrics in Course Tools. Depending on your saved dashboard layout, it appears as a main tile or a compact tool button. Rubrics are grouped by the module they are most associated with, so you can quickly find "Quiz 3's rubric" versus "Final Exam's rubric."

Rubric structure: criteria and point levels

A ProfDesk rubric is a table of criteria (rows) each with a set of point levels (columns), for example a criterion "Code Correctness" might have levels worth 0, 2, 4, and 5 points, each with a short description of what that level of work looks like. When you grade in ZenGrader, you click the point level that matches the student's work for each criterion, and the rubric panel adds them up automatically into the Total Rubric Score.

Option A: Add Rubric manually

Click Add Rubric. Give it a title (e.g. "Essay Rubric" or "Programming Assignment Rubric").
Continue to the builder. Add criteria rows one at a time.
For each criterion, add point levels with a score and a short description of what earns that score.
Save. The rubric is now available to attach to any question in the course.

Option B: Generate with AI

Click Generate with AI and describe the assignment (e.g. "a 500-word reflective essay on ethical dilemmas in nursing practice, for second-year students"). The AI proposes a full set of criteria and point levels in one pass, which you can then edit, add to, or remove rows from before saving, the AI output is a starting draft, not a final answer.

ProfDesk Manage Rubrics screen — Manage Rubrics: rubrics grouped by module, with Add Rubric and Generate with AI options.

AI rubric generation counts against your AI quota (see AI Grading for Free vs Pro limits). On the sample/demo course it draws from a separate, smaller lifetime trial allowance instead, so you can try it risk-free.

Editing, copying, and deleting

Edit opens the same criteria/point-level builder for an existing rubric.
Copy duplicates a rubric so you can tweak a variant without touching the original, handy when two questions are almost identical but not quite.
Delete removes a rubric. If it's still attached to a question, detach or replace it first.

Reusing rubrics across questions

A rubric isn't tied to one assessment. When you edit an assessment or one of its questions / sub-parts in Manage Assessments, you can pick any rubric already created in the course.

Rubrics