Surgical skill scores stop being tied to one rubric: PRA reads text descriptions, lifting macro-F1 by 0.113 over Video Swin-T
Automated surgical skill scoring has depended on a fixed rubric, so a new set of similarly worded assessment items meant retraining. Predictive Rubric Alignment (PRA) instead predicts a rater-weighted combination of the embeddings of each level's written description, then projects that prediction onto a path joining adjacent descriptions to read out a score. On AIxSuture suturing videos, the PRA-item variant with learned item queries reached 0.848 accuracy and 0.829 macro-F1, 0.113 macro-F1 above Video Swin-T, and PRA-cond trained on only two items still gave positive score correlations on unseen JIGSAWS items.