This paper addresses the job shop-scheduling problem with due date-based objectives including the tardy rate, mean tardiness and maximum tardiness. The focused approach is the dispatching rules. Eighteen dispatching rules are selected from the literature, and their features and design concepts are discussed. Then a dispatching rule is proposed with the goal of achieving a good and balanced performance when more than one objective is concerned at the same time. First, three good design principles are recognized from the existing rules. Second, it introduces a due date extension procedure to solve a problem of negative allowance time. Third, a job candidate reduction mechanism is developed to make the rule computationally efficient. Lastly, a comprehensive simulation study is conducted with the 18 existing rules as the benchmarks. The experimental results verify the superiority of the proposed rule, especially on the tardy rate and mean tardiness.