Day 42 - Criteria

I've been thinking a lot about criteria lately.
Not just how we mark assessments, but how we communicate what it is that we are looking for to the students, and how we communicate how they met up to those expectations after they've done it.
I've been working on identifying specific skills that run, like a thread, through a number of modules in a number of different levels, and tracing how we assess those to demonstrate consistency and transparency.
It's difficult, and has met with some resistance.
My aims are really two-fold:

1. Increase the information available to the student about the component parts that we are looking at (i.e. if the formatting of the essay affects the mark, let's reflect that in the criteria)
2. Reduce the amount of open feedback it is necessary to write.

I find that I tend to write a lot of the same things over and over again when I'm marking. In this case, why not embed it into the criteria?
I'll possibly give a few examples of how this is currently developing on another day's post after I've had a chance to work on the two specific areas I'm currently looking at,

I suppose that this is a perfect example of how I want to take a task that may seem like a bureaucratic administrative nightmare and use it to my example. Criteria should be there to help us in our task, not to just waste our time.