How to build a text assessment — multiple choice, multi-answer, dropdown, single input, or long form — and what makes one worth assigning.
Text assessments verify knowledge through written questions and answers. They fit when what you need to measure is what the learner knows, recognizes, or can produce in writing. They scale well — most question types auto-grade — and they work for compliance, certification, knowledge checks, and any program where the answer is verifiable text or a selection from a list.
If the skill you need to measure is a demonstration (a pitch, a screen walkthrough, a scenario response), a video or screen-recording assessment will tell you more than a text one. For the strategic frame on assessment formats, see Assessments: Designing Knowledge Checks That are useful.
How to Create a Text Assessment
1. Open the Assessments tab. Navigate to Create > Assessments from the left-hand navigation panel.
2. Add an Assessment. Click Add an Assessment.
3. Choose Quiz Assessment. The Quiz Assessment option is the text-based path. (For video, screen recording, or video coaching, use the corresponding format-specific creation articles.)
4. Fill in the basics. Title, Author Name, Description. Add tags if relevant — they help with searchability and reporting later.
5. Build the questions. From the Questions tab, add, edit, sort, and organize your assessment questions.
Click + Add a Question to add a new one. Pick the question type that fits the skill you're testing — see Text Question Types in Continu for guidance on when to use which type.
Inside the Question Builder, you can:
- Sort questions by dragging the arrow icon on the right
- Add more questions with + New Question
- Add a page break with + Add Section Break — questions within a section appear on the same page for the learner
6. Configure the settings. Click Next. This is where you set the pass mark, retake policy, certificate behavior, and grader rules. See Assessment Settings for the full breakdown. These are program design decisions — don't skip them.
7. Preview. Click Preview to see the assessment from the learner's view. The submit option is greyed out in preview — it's a view-only check.
8. Publish. Review the assessment and click Publish. The assessment is now ready to be assigned.
Considerations
Match the question type to the skill. Multiple Choice for recall, Multi Answer for "select all that apply" comprehension, Single Input for recall of a specific term, Long Form for reasoning. Mixing types is fine, but pick the right one for each question.
Write distractors that test understanding. Multiple-choice questions where two of four options are obviously wrong reduce to 50/50 guesses. Distractors should be plausible to a learner who half-understood the material.
Cue Multi Answer questions explicitly. If a question has multiple correct answers, say so in the question stem ("Select all that apply"). Without the cue, learners often stop at the first correct option.
Use Long Form sparingly. Long Form is for reasoning and application, not recall. It's manually graded, so every long-form question adds to the grader load.
Enable Randomize Questions for verification assessments. Without randomization, learners taking the assessment after a peer can sometimes recognize answer-order patterns. Randomization helps the assessment hold up to repeat exposure.
Configuration Pitfalls
Publishing Without Reviewing Assessment Settings. The default pass mark, retake limit, and certificate settings may not match your program's stakes. Click through to settings and adjust before publishing.
No Preview Pass. The Preview view shows what learners actually see — formatting issues, missing context, or ambiguous wording often surface here that didn't in the builder. Preview before publishing.
Auto-Grading on Open-Ended Single Input. Single Input auto-grades by exact match (including spelling and casing). For anything beyond a single defined term, plan on manual grading instead.
Section Breaks Without Purpose. Section breaks group questions onto the same page for the learner. Use them when questions belong together (a scenario with multiple sub-questions); avoid using them to artificially shorten a long assessment.
Skipping Tags. Tags help with searchability and reporting later. Adding them at creation time saves rework when you're trying to find or audit assessments six months later.
Where This Fits
You're here because you're creating a text assessment. The question types live in Text Question Types in Continu. The settings that shape pass/fail behavior live in Assessment Settings. Once published, see Assigning an Assessment for the assignment path that fits your audience.
See Also
- Assessments: Designing Knowledge Checks That are useful — the strategic anchor.
- Text Question Types in Continu — picking the right question type for each skill.
- Assessment Settings — pass mark, retakes, certificates, grading.
- Assigning an Assessment — assignment paths and audience choice.
- Create a Video Assessment — when the skill is a demonstration, not a written answer.
A text assessment scales well when the question type matches the skill and the settings match the stakes.