Writing Assessments

Best Practices for Writing Assessment Questions

The following best practices will help you to create more engaging and useful Assessments.

• Write your questions to represent Course objectives and adequately cover the critical and important course objectives. Validate your questions by mapping them back to objectives, rather than to modules or topics.

• Each question should contain one idea and one answer. Multiple concepts in one question could be confusing to the reader. Also, the answer needs to be 100% correct and the incorrect options (also known as distractors). need to be 100% incorrect, so keeping the question and answer simple avoids issues with half-correct answers.

  • Correct: How do you turn on your computer? (Press the power button/Press F12/Press Home/Press Backspace)
  • Incorrect: How do you turn on your computer and check your email? (Press the power button and select Outlook/Press the power button and select Recycle Bin/Press F12 and select Outlook/Press Home and select Outlook)

• Make each question ask something specific. Vague questions result in a high percentage of capable learners getting false credit and results in bad reporting.

  • Unacceptable: One of our top priorities is to deliver ___________.
  • Acceptable: Which of the following represents one of training’s top priorities at [company]?

• For multiple choice questions, include 1 correct answer and 2-3 distractors.

• When creating an assessment that uses both multiple choice and multiple select, make it clear that there is one correct answer. “Select the correct answer” is a good wording choice.

• For multiple select answers, we suggest no more than 3 correct answers and a total of 5 options. If you have 2 correct answers, supply up to 3 distractors. If you have 3 correct answers, supply 2 distractors. Additionally, end the question with a statement making it clear for the learner that there are multiple correct answers. “Select the three correct answers.” Or “Select all that apply” are good wording options.

• Do not use "all of the above” questions. They can be seen as trick questions, or they can stand out as the obvious answer.

• Do not use questions that ask the user to select what is not applicable in a list. This can be seen as a trick question and confusing if a reader isn’t reading very carefully.

• Strive to make all response options parallel (start with verb or noun) and approximately the same length. Having one response option be much shorter or longer than the others often give away the answer.

• Distractors should be plausible to a reader that does not have the skill that is being measured, but unquestionably incorrect to a reader that does have the skill. In other words, the distractor needs to be on topic, refer to the subject matter, but be undeniably incorrect.

• Whenever possible, provide specific feedback for why a question is correct or incorrect so that the assessment can act as a secondary source of learning and knowledge gain. (This only applies when the learner is not going to have another chance to take the test.)

• Avoid using absolute terms like "always," "none," and "only." Also, avoid "could," "would," etc.; use "can," and "will" instead. And avoid the use of contractions.