Student perceptions of scientific writing in pharmacology: Student generation of collaborative rubrics to score a social pharmacology writing project

Scholarly writing is an important skill in all fields of study. Despite a strong focus on writing in many courses, faculty and students have disparate expectations related to scholarly writing. Herein, a classroom exercise is presented in which students were asked to develop a rubric that would be used to evaluate their summative writing assessment. Students were provided with a list of elements that commonly represent good scholarly writing, asked to define what effectively demonstrating these elements looks like, and asked to assign the weight that would be given to each element. The weights given to each element by students were compared to a faculty‐generated, departmental writing rubric. Students assigned significantly higher weights to ideas, and significantly lower weights to sentence fluency. Overall, students favored content over writing mechanics. A random selection of student papers was scored using both the departmental rubric and the student rubric, with about a half‐letter grade difference between the two groups, though the difference was not statistically significant. The outcomes suggest this exercise may be valuable in offering insight into student perceptions of scholarly writing and in furthering student engagement in the writing process.