Introduction:To describe the development and validation of the self-care counseling rubric(SCCR) to assess student self-care counseling skills.Methods:Over two years of implementation, a comprehensive rubric was developed and revised for faculty to use. Students were assessed using the rubric in weekly, simulated patient en-counters on self-care topics already taught in didactic material. The rubric underwent analysis for validation. Simulated encounters were recorded to assess inter-rater reliability.Results:The internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) of the original SCCR and revised SCCR were0.81 and 0.85, respectively. The mean intraclass correlation of the original SCCR and revised SCCR was 0.27 and 0.66, respectively.Conclusions:The developed instrument demonstrated good reliability in assessing student self-care counseling performance. The revised SCCR can be an efficient and effective approach to track student competence in self-care counseling