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Generate assessment questions
~ min read
📋30-second summary
The AI generates twenty questions in a minute. The problem is half are trivial and some ambiguous: your job is to choose and calibrate, not to produce in volume.
Four formats, each with its own criterion: open-ended (one precise thing, not a disguised essay), multiple choice (distractors = typical errors, not absurdities), true/false (only for clean facts), problem-solving (step-by-step solution, kept separate from the prompt).
Calibrate difficulty on Bloom’s scale: a balanced test covers three or four levels, not just memory.
Questions that hold up against studying with AI: application to new cases seen in class, links to your own examples, tight formal constraints.
Two passes before handing it out: read it all as a marker, then answer it yourself as an average student. The AI produces ambiguous or factually wrong questions.
Asking the AI for twenty assessment questions on a chapter takes a
minute. The problem is what comes back: five trivial questions
anyone could derive from the section title, a few ambiguous ones
where it isn’t clear what you’re asking, and three or four in the
middle that work. The value you add isn’t the volume, which the AI
does faster than you. It’s choosing the right questions and
calibrating them to the class’s level.
Each format measures something different and is asked for
differently. These four cover almost everything.
Open-ended questions. Measure comprehension and the ability to
build an argument. The useful prompt is tight: “three open-ended
questions on chapter X, answerable in 5-10 lines, level apply”.
The check to make: each question must ask one precise thing. The AI
tends to produce disguised essay questions (“Analyze the causes,
consequences, and significance of…”) that are unanswerable in ten
lines and impossible to grade the same way for everyone.
Multiple choice. Measures recognition and application. Four
options, one correct, three distractors. A good distractor is an
error a student actually makes, not an absurdity you discard at a
glance. The prompt that raises quality: “for each distractor, tell
me why a student might pick it”. If the AI can’t justify a
distractor, that distractor isn’t plausible and should be cut. In
subjects where almost everything is interpretation (philosophy, art
history) multiple choice holds up poorly, because it forces a false
precision: there, lean on open-ended questions.
True/false. Useful only for clean facts, and rare in subjects
where almost everything has nuance. The risk is the AI generating
true/false on interpretable statements, where the answer depends on
context and the student is right to object. The constraint to put
in the prompt: “avoid true/false on questions that admit exceptions
or interpretations”.
Problem-solving. For mathematics, physics, chemistry,
economics, computer science: cases and exercises with data. The
useful prompt: “three problems of increasing difficulty on topic X,
each with the step-by-step solution, but keep the solutions
separate from the prompts”. The step-by-step solution is for you to
grade and to check the problem is well-posed, but it must not end
up on the student’s sheet. It works identically for a physics
problem or a math exercise: same request, same separated
step-by-step solution. The deep-dive exercise at the end of this
lesson has you build one on your own syllabus.
A question’s level isn’t “easy” or “hard” by gut feel. Bloom’s
scale gives six rungs of mental operation, from the most mechanical
to the most demanding: remember, understand, apply, analyze,
evaluate, create. A balanced test touches three or four, instead of
flattening onto a single rung. All on “remember” measures memory
and nothing else, and it’s also the easiest to get around with AI.
All on “create” (“what do you think of…”) becomes vague and
impossible to grade with criteria.
The boundary between one rung and the next is where people get lost.
On the same history chapter: “list the causes of the war” is
remember; “explain how the alliance system turned a local
assassination into a continental war” is apply, because you use a
mechanism on a case; “weigh the deep causes against the trigger
causes and decide which counted more” is analyze, because you
break apart and relate. Putting the level in the prompt (“questions
at the apply and analyze level”) is the fastest way to move the
test where you want it.
History, third year of high school, the chapter on the First World
War. Six mixed-format questions in one turn.
👤
You
Generate 6 assessment questions on the First World War chapter, third year of high school. Mix: 2 open-ended (5-10 lines, analyze level), 3 multiple choice with 4 options, 1 problem-solving on a historical case. For each multiple-choice distractor, tell me why a student might pick it. Keep the solutions separate from the prompts.Generate 6 assessment questions on the First World War chapter, third year of high school. Mix: 2 open-ended (5-10 lines, analyze level), 3 multiple choice with 4 options, 1 problem-solving on a historical case. For each multiple-choice distractor, tell me why a student might pick it. Keep the solutions separate from the prompts.
🤖
AI
Open-ended questions (analyze)
1. Explain why the system of alliances turned a local assassination into a continental war.
2. Compare the war of movement of 1914 with the trench war that followed: what changed and why.
Multiple choice
3. Italy enters the war in 1915 on the side of:
a) Germany and Austria-Hungary
b) France, the UK, and Russia [correct]
c) the Ottoman Empire
d) it stays neutral until 1917
4. A deep (not trigger) cause of the war was:
a) the assassination in Sarajevo
b) the arms race and nationalisms [correct]
c) the sinking of the Lusitania
d) the Russian Revolution
5. The Treaty of London (1915):
a) sealed a separate peace between Italy and Austria
b) promised Italy territory in exchange for entering the war [correct]
c) was the final 1918 armistice
d) established the League of Nations
Problem-solving (historical case)
6. Imagine Italy had stayed neutral for the whole conflict. Argue two plausible consequences for the Italian-Austrian front and one for postwar Italy, using facts from the chapter.
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Solutions (to detach) and the why of the distractors
3-b. a) confuses the pre-war Triple Alliance with the 1915 line-up; c) ties Italy to the Central Powers; d) confuses Italy with the United States.
4-b. a) is the trigger cause, not the deep one (typical category error); c) and d) are events after the war broke out.
5-b. a) reverses the meaning of the treaty; c) and d) confuse it with end-of-war or postwar events.Open-ended questions (analyze)
1. Explain why the system of alliances turned a local assassination into a continental war.
2. Compare the war of movement of 1914 with the trench war that followed: what changed and why.
Multiple choice
3. Italy enters the war in 1915 on the side of:
a) Germany and Austria-Hungary
b) France, the UK, and Russia [correct]
c) the Ottoman Empire
d) it stays neutral until 1917
4. A deep (not trigger) cause of the war was:
a) the assassination in Sarajevo
b) the arms race and nationalisms [correct]
c) the sinking of the Lusitania
d) the Russian Revolution
5. The Treaty of London (1915):
a) sealed a separate peace between Italy and Austria
b) promised Italy territory in exchange for entering the war [correct]
c) was the final 1918 armistice
d) established the League of Nations
Problem-solving (historical case)
6. Imagine Italy had stayed neutral for the whole conflict. Argue two plausible consequences for the Italian-Austrian front and one for postwar Italy, using facts from the chapter.
---
Solutions (to detach) and the why of the distractors
3-b. a) confuses the pre-war Triple Alliance with the 1915 line-up; c) ties Italy to the Central Powers; d) confuses Italy with the United States.
4-b. a) is the trigger cause, not the deep one (typical category error); c) and d) are events after the war broke out.
5-b. a) reverses the meaning of the treaty; c) and d) confuse it with end-of-war or postwar events.
The six questions cover several Bloom levels (remember with the
multiple choice, analyze with the open-ended, apply and evaluate
with the problem-solving) and four formats in one. The piece that
makes the difference is the “why” line under each distractor: it
tells you whether the wrong option is a real error (3a, which
confuses the Triple Alliance with the wartime line-up, is the
classic one) or filler to discard. Where the justification is weak,
rewrite the distractor or drop the question.
Don’t administer the test as it comes out. A set generated
entirely by the AI has a uniformity of tone you can spot, and
almost always contains an ambiguous or unbalanced question. Choose
the good questions, cut the ambiguous ones, rewrite the ones that
almost work: the test is yours because the grade is your
responsibility.
Don’t trust the AI on technical correctness. Historical dates,
chemical formulas, mathematical steps, legal definitions: the AI
gets them wrong with the same confidence it gets them right. Every
question resting on a precise fact must be checked against a source,
not against the AI’s second answer.
Don’t make trick questions on details never covered. If you ask
for “hard” questions, the AI happily pulls from sidebars and
footnotes your class has never touched. Hard should mean high on
Bloom’s scale, not obscure.
Ready questions means tests you can administer. But a test,
afterward, has to be graded, and there the risk is the opposite:
letting the AI assign the grade. The next lesson is about using it
as a grading assistant, with an explicit rubric, without it
becoming the judge.