With the increased emphasis in communicative language learning and task-based language teaching, classroom assessment increasingly includes performance-based assessments (e.g., essays, speeches, projects, presentations), which require careful planning and can be challenging to implement and assess. The ability to design and use well-designed assessments for language performance tasks is a critical skill for classroom instructors. A rubric is a tool to more objectively measure the quality of the language performance when assessing language use in open-ended tasks. Analytic rubrics, with multiple categories and descriptions reflecting various levels of performance, help the instructor evaluate the effectiveness of instruction, document evidence of learner progress, and give feedback to learners. This article synthesizes theoretical and empirical scholarship in order to describe how to construct well-designed analytic rubrics for classroom language assessment. Four main steps are described: (1) establishing categories, (2) describing levels of performance, (3) reviewing the components of the rubric before implementation, and (4) evaluating the effectiveness of the rubric after implementation.