> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.oqoqo.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Rubrics: Define Evaluation Criteria for Experiments > Define pass/fail criteria for your Oqoqo experiments. Oqoqo rewrites your rubric to eval best practices and scores every trial automatically. A rubric is how you tell Oqoqo what a successful trial looks like. You write your criteria in plain language, and Oqoqo handles the rest — rewriting them to follow evaluation best practices and scoring every trial automatically. The result is consistent, comparable pass/fail data across every run in your experiment. ## What a rubric is A rubric is a set of criteria that determine whether a trial passed or failed. Each criterion is a testable assertion about the agent's output or behavior. Oqoqo evaluates every criterion independently per trial, so you can see exactly which aspects of the task succeeded and which didn't. You write the rubric in plain language. You don't need to know how LLM-based evaluation works under the hood — Oqoqo rewrites your criteria to follow best practices before scoring begins. Your rubric is held constant across all trials in an experiment, so results are directly comparable. ## Writing a rubric Write each criterion as a testable assertion — something that is unambiguously either true or false given the agent's output. Vague or compound criteria tend to produce noisy results. **Tips:** * One assertion per criterion. Don't combine two checks into one sentence. * Focus on observable outputs. What did the agent return, write, or do? * Avoid subjective language like "good" or "appropriate" — phrase it so a reviewer could verify it mechanically. **Example criteria:** The output matches the expected data structure (e.g., a JSON array). Items in the output appear in the same order as the input. The agent's answer includes the current cache status. The agent completed the task without throwing an unhandled error. Total token cost for the trial is below the defined threshold. ## Auto-rewrite When you submit a rubric, Oqoqo rewrites it to follow industry best practices for LLM-based evaluation. This means your criteria are reformulated to reduce ambiguity, improve scoring consistency, and minimize false positives. You don't need to be an eval expert to get high-quality results. Write what you want the agent to do — Oqoqo handles the translation into a robust eval prompt. You can review the rewritten rubric before running your experiment. If a criterion produces unexpected results, adjusting the original wording and re-running is often enough to fix it. ## Validators Alongside rubrics, you can add **validators** — programmatic checks for deterministic assertions. Use validators when the check is mechanical and doesn't need LLM judgment. Good candidates for validators include: * **Schema shape** — confirm the output matches a JSON schema * **Output format** — check that a file was written in the right format * **Exact value match** — assert a specific field equals a known value * **Presence of required fields** — verify all required keys exist in the response Rubrics and validators work together. Rubrics handle the qualitative and behavioral checks; validators handle the structural and deterministic ones. ## Viewing results Rubric results appear in the **Evals** tab for each trial. Each criterion shows: * ✓ **Pass** — with supporting context from the trial output * ✕ **Fail** — with the reason the criterion was not met You can review results at the trial level or compare across all trials in the experiment to see which criteria are consistently failing and which are stable. ## Iterating on rubrics If a criterion catches too many false positives or misses real failures, update it and rerun. Oqoqo re-evaluates all trials against the updated rubric, so you don't have to re-execute the experiment. Look at trials where the result seems wrong — pass when it should fail, or fail when it should pass. Rewrite the assertion to be more precise. Add context, tighten scope, or split a compound criterion into two. Oqoqo re-scores all existing trials against the updated rubric. Compare before and after to confirm the update resolved the noise without introducing new issues. If you're unsure why a criterion failed on a specific trial, open the trace for that trial and read the agent's steps alongside the failure reason. The context usually makes the scoring decision clear.