How to generate and import a rubric into Canvas

I'll be honest: Building rubrics is one of my least favorite parts of teaching. I love writing assignments themselves. The challenge of building a learning task that will help students meet a given learning objective is very satisfying to me. But I find the work involved in creating a rubric that matches that assignment and clearly communicates expectations to those students repetitious and tedious. Even worse is the tooth-pulling experience that it takes to create a rubric in Canvas. Years ago I found a tool to import a rubric into Canvas from a .csv file, and for years this was my go-to process when I needed to remember how to add a rubric to an assignment in Canvas. But that process is also fairly technical, and many people will balk at the prospect of installing Tampermonkey. Even as a dedicated user, I had to continually relearn the Canvas rubric template needed for that script to work.

So in this blog post, I describe the grading rubric generator tool that I built. My Canvas rubric generator gives you as much control over your assessment criteria as you want, but you can also choose to have Claude automatically build the rubric based on whatever is in your assignment prompt.

Why building rubrics in Canvas takes so long

First off, let's get our litany of Canvas grievances out of the way. Building rubrics in the native Canvas rubric tool is painful. If you are reading this post, you have probably experienced the agony of hunting, pointing, and clicking involved in building a rubric. Apparently some institutions had access to an AI rubric generator tool in Canvas itself. As far as I can tell, that feature has been discontinued. I was able to find it in my own institution's Canvas settings, and it did seem to be turned on, but I don't think I ever saw it as an option when building rubrics.

The basic Canvas tool is a UI nightmare. It takes an exceptional amount of clicking and waiting to build even a basic rubric. Every single criterion and rating description requires its own set of clicks, and re-weighting criteria is buggy at best.

Importing an existing rubric from another course is also problematic. Every single course I have ever taught (and many that I haven't, for some reason) shows up when I click Find a Rubric in Canvas. My best workaround is to Ctrl-F and enter the course number to narrow down the options, then tab through dozens of options until I find the one I want. Once I find it, I have to go back to the click and wait dance if I want to make any changes.

So you can see why they built the original Tampermonkey-based import tool, and I don't blame Instructure for trying to make their own rubric tool better with AI. But seeing as that tool seems to be discontinued, I decided to build a rubric maker for teachers that would be easy to use and even easier when it comes to getting the rubric into Canvas.

How to convert an existing rubric for Canvas import

The default mode for my tool is set to accept an existing rubric. Just paste the rubric you already have in a PDF, Word, or a spreadsheet into the input box, and Claude will do its best to understand your structure and adapt it so that it can be uploaded to Canvas as an .imscc file. It is designed not to change any of the verbiage in your rubric, and you can view and edit the results before downloading.

How to generate a new rubric from your assignment prompt

You can also use my tool to start from an existing assignment prompt rather than an existing rubric. Just copy and paste the prompt, and then enter the assessment criteria and rating scales you want your rubric to use. Claude reads the prompt and writes descriptions for each criterion and each level of the rating scale.

AI-generated rubric details.

You can also choose to have Claude suggest assessment criteria and a rating scale based on the prompt itself.

How to edit the rubric

After the rubric has been generated, you can edit pretty much all of it. Just click and type to change point values, criteria labels, rating labels, and descriptions. Changes are saved immediately.

How to import a rubric into Canvas

Once you have crafted the perfect rubric, you can export it as an .imscc file and download it to your computer. Then go to the course where you need the rubric and import that file. Your rubric will be copied into the rubric page in your course.

What is an .imscc file?

IMSCC stands for IMS Common Cartridge (Canvas users often see this labeled as "Canvas Common Cartridge"). This is a standard format for educational content that can be imported into several different Learning Management Systems. If you use Canvas, you can export your rubric to .imscc and then import it into the course where you need it.

Why not just use a chatbot?

You could. In fact, when ChatGPT came out, one of my first experiments involved using it to read an assignment prompt and suggest assessment criteria. But ChatGPT itself is not a great grading rubric generator, unless you do a lot of prompt engineering and iterating. And it would take several more rounds of trial and error to get into an importable form. With my rubric generator, you can easily adjust and edit your rubric until you have it just the way you want it, and then download it in a format that is Canvas-ready or in an easily shareable Word file or as a .csv file, which you can open in any spreadsheet program.

Will the AI train on my data?

A lot of people are concerned about running their own intellectual property through a large language model, since most of the AI companies have shaky track records when it comes to respecting other people's intellectual property. One of the advantages of the Sheetbend rubric generator is our privacy-first design: When you run your assignment prompt through our rubric generator, it's sent to Anthropic's API, which does not use API inputs for model training. We don't store or log the content of your prompts. They do pass through our servers in transit but are not saved or stored. You can review our privacy policy for details.