According to Kohn, there are more than a few reasons that teachers should detest the use of rubrics in the classroom due to their efforts to standardize student writing output. Furthermore, he stated that, “improving the design of rubrics, or inventing our own, won’t solve the problem because the problem is inherent to the very idea of rubrics and the goals they serve.” Not only does he believe that rubrics should cease to exist in the language arts classroom, but that the elimination of grades altogether is at the apex of authentic assessment. While he recognizes that they came about as a means of limiting teacher subjectivity, Kohn argues from the perspective that the grading of student writing “necessarily entails the exercise of human judgment, which is an imprecise, subjective affair.”

Three reasons why educators should be against the use of rubrics:

1. In speaking of children whose writing instruction is regularly assessed using rubrics, “They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in learning itself.”
2. “They do nothing to address the terrible reality of student who have been led to focus on getting A’s rather than on making sense of ideas.”
3. Rubric scores do not always accuracy assess the quality of written work. Kohn states, “High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.” The reverse could be argued that low scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is bad for the same reason.