Processus de coconstruction d’une grille critériée pour l’évaluation de productions écrites complexes à l’université

Graduate studies go way beyond the simple acquisition of knowledge, aiming among other things at developing critical thinking as well as research and scientific writing skills. Evaluating the latter poses real challenges. Rubrics have long been used to assess writing skills but have not yet made their way into the evaluation practices in the context of graduate studies. This article presents a co-construction process conducted by a team of professors, students and educational counsellors from Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). It led to the development and testing of a rubrics-based evaluation tool to assess scientific writing skills among master’s and doctoral students. Following a literature review and the exploration of tools previously used in one university faculty, an inductive and iterative approach helped develop an evaluation grid including eight criteria divided into sub-criteria, each being accompanied by a qualitative descriptive scale. While the first experiments of the tool support its usefulness and relevance, the pitfalls that emerged from the process are discussed in light of the contributions and limits of such tools in the context of graduate studies. Beyond the creation of the tool itself, the innovative nature of the project was also related to the process of collective thinking that was used, going beyond the individual production method usually followed for the construction of such tools.