ASSESSMENT DESIGN AND EXAMINATION QUESTION WRITING

Well-designed assessments help educators understand what learners know, how effectively they apply their knowledge and where further support is needed. Clear questions, balanced content coverage and consistent marking are essential to making assessment fair and meaningful. **Assessment Design and Examination Question Writing** equips healthcare educators, lecturers, clinical instructors and examiners with practical approaches to developing assessments that align with learning outcomes and support sound educational decisions. The course explores how to create assessment blueprints that balance curriculum content, cognitive demand and mark allocation. Participants will examine techniques for writing multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions and case-based tasks that assess understanding, application and professional reasoning. Particular attention is given to constructing clear question stems, plausible distractors and realistic scenarios while avoiding ambiguity, unintended clues and bias. Participants will also learn how to develop model answers, marking guides and rubrics that communicate expectations and promote consistent scoring. The course addresses reviewing questions, moderating assessments and using assessment results to identify weaknesses in questions and opportunities to improve teaching. By the end of the course, participants will be better prepared to design purposeful examinations, write effective questions and develop transparent marking criteria—producing assessments that provide useful evidence of learning and guide further development.