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Designing assessment tasks

The main goal when designing and writing assessment tasks is to ensure they are clear, cohesive, and have instructions that carefully guide students through the task. Assessment tasks should align with learning outcomes, be fair and inclusive, and encourage meaningful engagement.

Ensuring clarity

Clear and purposeful assessment tasks are essential for student success. A lack of clear instructions or guidelines is one of the most common concerns raised by student evaluations at Monash.

To ensure consistency, keep all assessment information in one section on Moodle.

Students need to understand the purpose of an assessment task and how it aligns with the curriculum before they can begin. The assessment brief should communicate the:
- Purpose of the task: Clearly outline how the task aligns with the unit learning outcomes and contributes to the development of specific skills or knowledge.
- Content of the task: Describe what the task involves, emphasising its connection to key concepts, topics, or objectives within the curriculum.
- Intended audience: Specify who the student is addressing in the task, such as a professional audience or academic peers.
- Intended evidence or output: Explain what output students are expected to demonstrate or produce through the task, as evidence of their learning.
Well-designed assessment task instructions have a clear structure and use subheadings to help students navigate and understand the task requirements. Ensure the assessment task brief addresses the:
- expected genre or writing style
- required referencing and citation style
- required format and/or media type
- expected or permitted collaboration either with peers or using technology, including generative artificial intelligence.
Standard submission times contribute to a consistent student experience, which is an important aspect of providing a fair and equitable learning environment.
Monash standard assessment submission times are (local time):
- 9:30 AM
- 4:30 PM
- 11:55 PM
The standard assessment submission times are preconfigured in the Assignment activity type in Moodle. For other Moodle activities, the standard submission time will need to be applied in the activity settings.
Assessment submission times can only be varied by the Chief Examiner if the reason aligns with one of these categories:
- Pre/in/post-class activities: For submission of work allocated in a scheduled class that is due before, during, or after the class has taken place.
- Departmental exam activities: Departmental exam activities are timed assessment tasks where a student has an allocated amount of time to complete the task. Submission times may fall outside the default times.
- Non-assessed activities: These activities have no weight (do not contribute to unit marks) or are for a non-coursework unit and the proposed time is used to support student time management.
- Offline assessments: These activities do not require a submission but creating a Moodle assignment allows offline assessments to be marked with marking guides or rubrics, captured as part of Spec Con process and appear with other assessments for students.
All assessment tasks should be written for the appropriate year level; first year tasks may look quite different to those at postgraduate level. You may need to be more instructive at earlier year levels as well to ensure students develop the appropriate skills of navigating assessment at university level.
Ensure that the following questions are answered in the assessment task brief:
- What would concrete examples of this case or task look like?
- How would students find out what conventions or approaches are suitable?
Consider the language you are using to explain your assessment tasks.
- Is it understandable to a wide range of learners?
- Does it contain jargon that only certain groups may understand?
Further, avoid complexity in your assessment tasks to ensure they are accessible. If multi-part assignments are used, ensure submissions requirements and due dates are specified for each part.

Ensuring quality

As well as ensuring clarity in the writing of assessment tasks, it is also important to ensure that your assessment tasks are written with quality in mind. Quality assessment also minimises student confusion about what is expected in the task.
Use the following questions to do a quick quality check of your assessments before releasing them to students:

Does the assessment task align with the relevant content and learning outcomes?
Does the assessment promote engagement, and deep approaches to learning?
Is the assessment relevant to the real-world / does it replicate expectations in the workplace?
Does the value of the task reflect sustained student involvement and effort over time?
Does this assessment create opportunities for dialogic interaction and feedback between educators and students, or between students?

See Carless (2015) for more information about ensuring quality in your assessments.

Writing questions and prompts

The questions or prompts that drive your assessment tasks should align with the learning objectives, allow you to collect evidence of student learning and provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate a clear outcome. If correctly written, assessment tasks can measure most learning objectives including higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Armstrong, 2010). When writing questions, there should be opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge at different cognitive levels.

Explore the following to learn more about writing different types of questions or prompts for assessment tasks.

Essay prompts are constructed-response questions, and usually involve long written responses. These questions are most appropriate for assessments that cannot be accomplished with other question types.
Essay questions are the only question type that can effectively assess all six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson, 2010). They allow students to express their thoughts and opinions in writing, granting a clearer picture of the level of student understanding.
What are some considerations when creating essay questions?
- Set clear expectations on word limits and structure of the essay
- Answers will need to be manually marked
- The marks allocated to essay questions should reflect the amount of time spent answering the question
- Scoring can be difficult because of the variety of answers, as well as the “halo effect” (students rewarded for strong writing skills as opposed to demonstrated mastery of the content)
- Using criteria, marking guides, or a rubric aides in consistent marking of essays and short-answer questions. Visit Rubrics for further information.
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are most appropriate for factual, conceptual, or procedural information. One correct answer is given with multiple distractors (incorrect responses).
Questions can take the form of incomplete sentences, statements or a scenario with multiple questions. Multiple choice questions can be designed to assess the first four levels of the revised Blooms’ Taxonomy i.e., Remembering, Understanding, Applying and Analysing, since they require a predictable answer.
Entering individual questions into a Moodle question bank allows you to reuse them in the future, or shuffle questions amongst a larger pool of questions. A bulk upload of multiple choice questions can be imported using Aiken format.
What are some considerations when creating MCQs?
Question format
- Provide clear instructions to the student
- Questions should be written in the simplest, clearest form
- Put as much of the necessary wording in the question itself, rather than the answers
- Keep option lengths similar (avoid making the correct answer the long or short answer)
- Where possible, state the question in positive rather than negative terms or if it can't be avoided, highlight the negative term (ie. in bold).
Writing distractors (incorrect response options)
- Distractors should be incorrect, but plausible and based on common misconceptions
- Distractors should be homogeneous in nature
- Avoid "always" and "never" in distractors and use terms such as "usually", "likely" and rarely"
- Options like "all of the above" or "none of the above" should be used sparingly
- True statements that do not answer the question can make good distractors
- Make each distractor grammatically similar to the correct response and consistent with the question.
Emphasise higher-level thinking
- Use a scenario that applies a concept in a new context to test higher order thinking skills
- To assess students’ comprehension level, ask the learner to distinguish whether statements are consistent with a principle, concept, or rule
- Present a characteristic in the question stem, and then ask the learner to identify the rule or concept
- Ask students to interpret a diagram or read a stimulus
Use premise-choice or multi-logical questions to require a high level of discriminating judgement. These questions often use words in the question such as best, most important, first, or most correct.
Multiple response questions (MRQs) are those questions where there is more than one correct response. This increases the level of difficulty as there are more combinations of correct responses, requiring students to read all choices and critically determine the best responses.
What are some considerations when creating MRQs?
- Ensure that the directions or question clearly indicates that there may be multiple correct responses and that all correct responses must be chosen
- You may want to weigh MRQs differently, giving points for each correct answer; however keep in mind that an increased weight of a question could give a hint to students the number of correct answers
- Follow the same considerations as MCQs when writing the question, answers and distractors
- In Moodle, you can set up multiple choice questions to have multiple correct answers. When setting up the quiz question, you can give a weight to each correctly selected response
- If you are using H5P to create this type of question, negative points may be given if all correct answers are not selected
- Double-check the scoring within the question preview tool when using multiple response questions
Fill-in-the-blank questions are “constructed-response” that require students to provide an answer. These types of questions are most appropriate for questions that require student recall over recognition.
Examples include assessing the correct spelling of items or in cases when students need to remember information. You can also use fill-in-the-blank online questions for mathematical questions where the student needs to input a number, symbol or equation.
What are some considerations when creating fill-in-the-blank questions?
- Answers should be one word or small phrases
- Ensure that there is one clear solution for the missing blank or short answer
- Determine what are the different possible correct answers and input these into the system, and set whether the answer will be case sensitive
- When creating the correct responses, account for different combinations of words to ensure all correct answers are accepted (i.e. 0.5, one half, 1/2)
- Students will be penalised for incorrect spelling for automated fill-in-the-blank and short answer questions; depending on the tool used to assess, you can calibrate for misspelled words
- Fill-in-the-blanks are good for open book assessments where students can double-check their spelling before submitting
- Labelling a diagram is a visual version of fill-in-the blank questions
- Test the quiz with multiple spelling and written options to ensure efficacy of the questions
True/false questions present a statement, and prompt the student to choose whether the statement is true. These questions are most appropriate for factual information and naturally dichotomous information (information with only two plausible possibilities).
What are some considerations when making true/false questions?
- Generally, students have a high probability of guessing the correct answer
- Questions assess recognition of information as opposed to recall
- Keep statements clear and concise to avoid ambiguity
- If a Moodle quiz allows multiple attempts, students may correct the answer without reflecting on the original incorrect response
- In some instances, you may want to consider reworking a true/false question to add an open ended question requiring students to explain their answer
Matching questions involve paired lists that require students to provide a correct “match” depending on the relationship between the items. These are most appropriate for assessing student understanding of related information.
Matching items can assess a large amount of information relative to multiple-choice questions, decreasing the probability of guessing correctly. This type of question allows for both visual or textual matching elements. Drag-and-drop question types have similar properties but require a student to move an object into the correct place, usually on an image or diagram.
What are some considerations when making matching or drag and drop questions?
- Items must be related or the answers will be too obvious (e.g. body parts and their functions for a specific body system)
- Both question types allow for text based questions and images to be matched together. These can also be mixed and matched, for example dragging a text onto an image
- Prepare your visuals in advance as you will not be able to edit these in applications like H5P.
- Depending on the tool you are using, keep the matching text short. Avoid using long sentences as this may become difficult to read
- Drag and drop questions can be used to rank items if the drop area denotes rank
- Drag and drops can be created digitally for students to label diagrams or images or to order information
- If using H5P for drag-and-drop, limit the number of items to be dragged. The system does not remember the students responses and they will need to restart from scratch each time
- Avoid using H5P drag-and-drop for assessments with a mark associated as it does not record properly in Moodle Gradebook
- Drag-and-drop question types are not accessible and are not easily read by screen readers. If you have students that may have visual impairments, you will need to create an alternative question type.

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Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Designing assessment tasks

Ensuring clarity

Ensuring quality

Writing questions and prompts

What are some considerations when creating MCQs?

What are some considerations when creating MRQs?

Your feedback matters