Rubrics and Decision Matricies

Abstract

Designing rubrics for informed decision making

How often do committees spend an inordinate amount of time nit-picking a trivial issue and fail to discuss the heart of a problem? Do you find yourself constantly busy, but never seeming to make much headway with things that need to be done?

Breaking a big decision or set of daily tasks into facets can help individuals manage the process. By creating a rubric or decision matrix of small, easy to tackle tasks and decisions you avoid a daunting initial hurdle and build a stronger final accomplishment.

This process can be used for personnel search committees, libraries making large purchase or program decisions, and to help individuals make decisions about their own work goals and promotion process.

Designing a good rubric is a skill that can be developed. A rubric should be designed to summarize, clarify and guide discussion towards a decision, allowing the committee (or you) to focus on the issues most important to the final decision.

This helps produces efficient committee meetings, reduce anger and dissention and provides documented support for the committee's decision when making a report to higher administrators.

This presentation will go through the steps for creating a good decision values rubric, how to weigh and combined the rubric elements and the best ways to use the resulting values to guide decision discussions. We will also talk about managing the unknown and factors outside the committee's control.