Every graded TESU assignment is scored against a rubric that lives inside myEdison with the assignment itself, and a course mentor applies it to turn your work into one of the catalog's letter grades. There is no single university-wide rubric; each course names its own criteria, usually a handful of dimensions like content, analysis, use of sources, and format, and describes what strong, adequate, and weak work looks like on each. Read that rubric before you draft, answer every named criterion in plain sight, cite the module's own materials, and format to current APA, and you are writing to the exact instrument the letter comes from.
Where the rubric actually lives
TESU courses run as module sequences inside myEdison on Moodle, and each written assignment or discussion posts its grading criteria alongside the prompt. That placement is the first practical fact: the rubric is not hidden and is not a surprise, it is attached to the work before you start, and the students who lose points to it are almost always the ones who read the prompt and skipped the criteria. Open both at the same time, every module, and the assignment stops being a guess about what the mentor wants.
How a TESU rubric is built
Rubrics vary by course, but the architecture is consistent. A rubric breaks a grade into a small set of criteria, each carrying a share of the score, and describes performance levels for each one:
- Criteria: the dimensions the assignment is judged on, commonly the depth of content, the quality of analysis or argument, the use and integration of sources, and mechanics or format
- Levels: the descriptions of what each criterion looks like when it is done well, done adequately, or missed, which is where the mentor's judgment attaches
- Weight: how much each criterion contributes, so a paper strong on content but thin on source integration lands where the weighting says it lands, not where its best paragraph suggests
The move that most improves a grade costs nothing: match your section headings to the rubric's criteria so the mentor can find each one without hunting. A rubric criterion the reader cannot locate is a criterion at risk, however well you actually addressed it.
How the mentor applies it
TESU mentors are graders and guides rather than lecturers, which means the written record is nearly the whole relationship. The mentor reads your submission against the rubric, scores each criterion at its level, and resolves the result to a letter. Because the same mentor grades a full term of your work, consistency compounds: a clean, on-time, rubric-aligned first submission sets an expectation that pays margin across the term, while a scramble reads instantly against everything before it. The record is what the mentor knows of you, so the record is worth managing deliberately.
From rubric to letter
The rubric produces a score; the catalog's grading policy turns it into a mark. TESU runs a plus-minus letter ladder with a hard ceiling at A and holds you to three separate 2.0 floors, overall, English Composition, and your area of study, and the full mechanics of that ladder and those floors are the grading manual's subject. The point worth carrying here is that a rubric is upstream of all of it: you influence the letter most where you can influence it at all, which is on the rubric, before submission, not on the transcript after.
Using the rubric to earn the A
The desk builds every draft against the rubric the way a mentor reads it: each criterion answered in order, the module's assigned materials cited first because imported bibliographies are visible, structure kept on the surface, and current APA applied where the format criterion names it. A model comes back in 24 to 48 hours, and revision runs free until the letter posts. Send a rubric with your prompt and the work is written to your exact scoring instrument rather than a generic idea of a good paper; the assignment desk is where that happens module by module.
Have the rubric, not the time?
Send the prompt and its criteria. A rubric-true model comes back in 24 to 48 hours; the first is free.
Sources and verification
Facts on this page come from official sources, and anything that matters is worth checking against the originals:
- tesu.smartcatalogiq.com · Policy on Grading: the catalog's grading policy and letter marks
- www.tesu.edu · Taking Courses: how modules, mentors, and myEdison grading work
- apastyle.apa.org: the APA authority behind most format criteria