PURE SCORE

In the food industry, all aspects of the way food arrives at the table are reviewed and marked subjectively. The reviewers or the patrons make a judgement-based assessment on how the food tastes to them and make a decision on whether or not they want to try that meal again.  If the patrons make their judgements of the food public, it can have a positive or even a negative effect on that business. That is why it is important to have an objective rating system for the food that can be continually updated and evaluated.  

In the education industry, judgement-based assessments are assessed by interpreting observations and collecting evidence such as student behaviour, assignments, exams and tests.  The way to interpret these observations into a number, a percentage or a grade is through the use of a rubric. A rubric is a scoring system that evaluates performance and explains why a specific rating has been given (Griffin, 2014).

Rubrics can be used when evaluating how food is presented, cooked and how it is served to the patron. To begin writing a rubric, you need to know what it is you are marking. In the case of marking burgers, one should think about how the burger tastes, how the burger smells, how the burger is put together and the burger’s appearance.  

The rubrics that have been derived on this website are part of what is called the PURE SCORE. PURE stands for the Perfect Ultimate Ratings for Everything and is something that my girlfriend and I came up with when marking a dish. The PURE score is derived by a rubric and a score is calculated based on the cutpoints related to the items in the rubric. The items are parts of the categories of the burger and are as objective as possible.

According to Griffin (2014), there are ten rules to writing rubrics. The rules include that there should be no counts of things, no ambiguous language, no procedural steps, it should describe performances clearly, it should contain one central idea, it should be directly observable, it needs to cover a diverse range of abilities, no weightings, has four or fewer criteria and be transparent. 

In the example below, the rating for the burger was 45 out of 50 according to the PURE (Perfect Ultimate Ratings for Everything) score. This score was calculated by adding the coloured squares or items above the cutpoint of zero and multiplying that value by five.

To understand more about rubrics and judgement-based assessments, you can view the following reference:

Griffin, P. (Ed) (2014). Assessment for Teaching. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 

The rubrics below are two early rubrics that I used. However, after reading Assessment for Teaching by Griffin (2014), the two rubrics do not follow the ten rules for writing rubrics.