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Like other assessment tasks, examinations can be used to measure student learning and the effectiveness of the learning process. So, we must ensure that the skills examined during the examination are constructively aligned with the skills required by the subject learning outcomes. To do this, look at the action verbs in the subject learning outcomes. For example, students may need to be able to explain key principles or make recommendations around a particular problem. These action verbs are key to designing an exam that produces evidence of students demonstrating those skills and abilities. Another aspect that could be considered is whether the exam is an assessment of learning, for learning, or as learning. The timing of an exam may dictate the type of exam; for example, a mid-session exam may focus on an assessment of learning, while the end-of-session exam is an assessment of learning. So the above is all about identifying what you require at the end of the assessment, what you want students to learn or show. Then you can ‘plan backwards’ to design the exam you need and obtain the evidence from the exam that you require.

A fixed response can be explained as an objective response in which students select the correct response to a question or supply a word or short phrase to answer a question or complete a statement. This can be done in multiple-choice, true-false, matching, or fill-in-the-blank questions. A constructed response is a subjective narrative that challenges students to create an original answer. Examples include short answer, long answer, essay, multimodal responses, reflections, or performance test items.

The verbs in the learning outcome can provide direction towards the choice of the question type. Some verbs such as identify, list, and select clearly indicate that students need to select the response. If the question is written in such a way that a student has to reason in order to select a correct response, student actions such as analyse or compare could be included in the selection of answers. Generally, verbs such as analyse, apply, interpret, compare, infer and predict indicate that a student should construct a response.