Plenty of English teachers run Catch-22 in more than one kind of class. An honors section may be ready to tackle satire and structure head on, while an on-level section is still building confidence with sustained analysis. Using the same rubric for both can leave one group bored and the other overwhelmed.

The instinct is to write two entirely different rubrics, but that doubles your prep and creates a fairness problem. Students talk, and a difference in what counts as an A can feel arbitrary. A better approach keeps a shared core and adjusts the expectations on top of it.

The core is what you want every student to be able to do with the novel: make a claim, support it with evidence, and explain how the evidence works. That does not change by course level. What changes is the sophistication expected at each level and the amount of scaffolding you provide.

Here is how to build that structure so it stays manageable.

Keep the Same Skeleton

Use identical criteria across sections: thesis, evidence, analysis, organization, and conventions. This lets you compare results across classes and keeps the expectations legible to students and families. The rubric language for the top level in each criterion is where the differences show up.

• Same criteria names across every section
• Higher expectations for abstraction and complexity in honors
• More explicit prompts and sentence starters in on-level classes
• Different weighting where a skill is the focus of instruction
• Shared exemplar papers annotated for each level

Adjust the Ceiling, Not Just the Floor

Differentiation often gets framed as lowering expectations for some students, but the real work is raising the ceiling for others. In an honors class, a top analysis score might require engagement with tension or ambiguity in Heller's satire. In an on-level class, it might require a clear explanation of how a specific example reveals the target of the satire.

Both are demanding in their own way, and both are anchored in the text. The difference is in how much independence and abstraction you expect. Students in both groups should finish feeling that they were asked to think.

Scaffold the Prompt as Well as the Rubric

The rubric is only one part of the picture. On-level students often benefit from a prompt that names the passages to analyze or the device to focus on, while honors students can handle a more open question. Adjusting the prompt this way means you can keep the rubric language nearly identical.

Sentence starters and paragraph frames are another useful tool, but treat them as temporary. Remove them as students gain confidence so that the final assignment shows what they can do on their own.

Grading Multiple Rubrics Without Losing Your Mind

Managing different expectations across sections adds mental overhead, especially when you grade in big batches. Setting up each section's rubric in GraideMind lets the tool apply the right criteria to the right set of essays and draft feedback that reflects each level. That keeps your grading aligned without requiring you to hold every rubric in your head.

After grading, compare growth within each section rather than across them. What matters is whether students moved forward from where they started. That is a fairer measure of learning and a better basis for planning the next unit.