Providing meaningful feedback is a cornerstone of student success, and rubrics are essential tools for maintaining transparency and consistency in grading. On May 16, 2026, Canvas Enhanced Rubrics will be turned on in Canvas. This updated feature is designed to streamline how you build, manage, and use rubrics in your courses. In preparation for rolling out this updated feature, I (Rebecca George-Burrs, Academic Technologist in Academic Technology Support Services) spent some time building some new rubrics and managing my existing rubrics in the Enhanced Rubrics space. This blog post is my review of Enhanced Rubrics.
New Streamlining Features for Building Rubrics
Building rubrics in Canvas has been known for being time-consuming and requiring persistence. Enhanced Rubrics brings a more intuitive user interface to build and revise rubrics along with flexible viewing and scoring options that make the grading process more efficient. Here is a list of updates that I was most pleased about:
- Drag-and-Drop Reordering: If you have ever tried to build a rubric in Canvas, you have probably faced the frustration of deciding you want to move criteria around on the rubric as you are building it out only to find that it isn’t possible. Enhanced Rubrics takes away that frustration by allowing you to easily rearrange your criteria by dragging and dropping them into the desired order at any time throughout the rubric creation process.
- Criterion Duplication: Instead of starting from scratch for every criterion row, you can now duplicate a single criterion within a rubric and then easily edit any details within the new criterion row.
- Draft Mode: You can now save rubrics as drafts before they are officially published and attached to assignments.
- Improved Management: A new "Archive" tab allows you to temporarily hide rubrics you aren’t using without deleting them entirely. If you have rubrics from past assessments that you don’t want to get rid of but are not doing that exact assessment in a particular term, this feature will help you reduce the clutter on your rubric management page without deleting something you may use again in the future. It’s important to note that archived rubrics cannot be used with an assignment, but the manual labor of archiving and unarchiving rubrics makes this feature beneficial for overall management of multiple rubrics in a course.
- CSV Import/Export: The Enhanced Rubrics feature includes a template CSV file that you can download and draft your rubric content in and then import it to your Canvas site. In my experimentation with the template, I experienced glitches where not all content was fully imported into the course site from the template when I tried to use it. You may find that copy/pasting rubric criterion and descriptions from an existing Google Doc or Sheet directly into the Enhanced Rubric builder in Canvas to be less frustrating than using the provided template.
Responsive Views in SpeedGrader
Another significant update I noticed is the addition of responsive display modes in SpeedGrader when you grade student work with a rubric. You can now choose a view that best fits your screen size, rubric content, and grading style.
Vertical View
- This view displays the rating scales for each criterion in a vertical row below the criteria name and description.
- This view may be best used for rubrics that have three or fewer possible ratings for each criterion. The screenshot above shows one criterion with five possible scores laid out vertically on the screen. For rubrics with many ratings and many criteria, this view requires you to scroll a lot when grading student work.
- It allows the comment box for each criterion to be immediately available without extra clicks.
- Notice in the screenshot above that the individual criterion description for each rating is NOT shown in this view. If you build out substantial criterion feedback for each rating, you may find this view challenging to use while grading.
Horizontal View
- This view displays criteria as columns in a compact, horizontal layout underneath the criterion title and description.
- This view works well for rubrics with many rating scales because it displays the ratings in a horizontal manner taking away the need to scroll so much while grading.
- It allows the comment box for each criterion to be immediately available without extra clicks.
- Notice in the screenshot above that the individual criterion description for each rating is NOT shown in this view. If you build out substantial criterion feedback for each rating, you may find this view challenging to use while grading.
Traditional View
- This view provides the classic grid layout many instructors are familiar with.
- The traditional view works best for rubrics that have a description for each criterion rating in the rubric that you use for deciding on the specific rating.
- The downside to this view is that it requires you to click the comments icon to add your specific comments for each criterion.
Important Considerations and "Gotchas"
While these enhancements offer many benefits, there are a few critical “Gotchas” I want to point:
- The Deletion "Gotcha": Deleting a rubric from the assignment area will remove it from all associated assignments in the course and permanently delete any existing scores or assessments given using that rubric. Important: Do not delete rubrics from the assignment area; instead, manage the deletion of any rubrics from the Rubrics course menu area.
- Existing Rubrics transfer over seamlessly: Any rubrics you already use in course sites will automatically transfer over to the Enhanced Rubric tool. Come May 16, 2026, your existing rubrics will appear with the new user interface and new editing features.
- Editing Limitations: There are two triggers that will take away your editing ability on a rubric:
- Once a student has submitted work to the activity that uses the rubric, you cannot edit it.
- If you assign the rubric to more than one activity, you cannot edit it. However, you can duplicate an existing rubric to make necessary revisions for a new activity rubric.
- Current Restrictions: At this time, Enhanced Rubrics do not support Group Assignments or Mastery Paths.
For those of you who already use rubrics in your Canvas course, mark May 16th on your calendar to try out the enhanced user interface. If the current rubric creation experience seemed intimidating or downright not worth your time, I encourage you to go back into the Rubrics menu after May 16th and try building out a new rubric with the smoother, more enhanced interface. Test out the drag-and-drop reordering and criterion duplication tools. Try opening SpeedGrader on a mobile device or tablet and test the new responsive vertical and horizontal views firsthand. This updated feature will improve your overall experience in creating and managing course rubrics and streamline your grading workflow.
Resources
Authors/Contributors
- Rebecca George-Burrs, Academic Technologist in Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS)
- Note: This blog post was created using a customized Gemini Gem. All content was comprehensively reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a human team for accuracy and the removal of potential AI-introduced bias.
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