Setup Considerations: assessment design

What this achieves

An assessment’s pass mark, attempt limit, and timing decide what passing means and how hard it is to achieve. These settings are visible to the learner before they start, so changing them after people have sat the assessment changes what earlier results meant.

Decision 1: the pass mark

The pass mark is a percentage of the total points available. Learners are told it before they begin, alongside the question count and the points on offer.

Set it against what someone genuinely needs to know rather than against a number that sounds rigorous. A pass mark nobody reaches means the assessment is unusable; one everybody clears tells you nothing.

Example: an HC Corp UK Ltd compliance assessment with a high pass mark is defensible because the material is mandatory and the questions are direct. The same mark on a broad knowledge test would fail people who are competent.

Decision 2: how many attempts

Attempts are a fixed count, and a learner who exceeds it cannot start again — the interface refuses at the point they try.

Option	Description
A single attempt	Suits a formal test where the first answer is the answer.
Several attempts	Suits learning-oriented assessment where the point is to reach competence.

Decide which of those two things you are doing. A single attempt on a learning assessment turns a teaching tool into an exam, and several attempts on a compliance test weakens the evidence it produces.

Consider also what happens to someone who fails on their last attempt. If your answer is “we reassign or retrain them”, that is a process you own — the assessment records the result and does nothing further.

Decision 3: whether to impose a time limit

A time limit is optional. Where one is set, the assessment auto-submits when it expires, with warnings at two minutes and thirty seconds, and answers save as the learner works.

Time pressure tests recall under pressure. If that is not what you are assessing, the limit adds anxiety without measuring anything you wanted.

Decision 4: proctoring, and what it records

Assessments can be proctored, and proctoring is more intrusive than most settings in the product. Learners are told what is required before they begin.

Option	Description
Fullscreen	The browser switches to fullscreen and leaving it is treated as a violation.
Webcam monitoring	The webcam stays on and random screenshots are uploaded for proctoring review.
Tab-switch limits	Leaving the tab counts as a violation, and the attempt auto-submits after a set number.

This records people. Webcam screenshots of employees taking an assessment are personal data, and the decision to collect them — for which assessments, retained for how long, reviewed by whom — sits with your organization. Take it to your own data-protection adviser rather than switching it on because it is available.

Use proctoring where the result genuinely matters and a credible failure mode exists. A mandatory annual refresher rarely needs a webcam.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd proctors an assessment tied to a formal certification and leaves its internal knowledge checks unproctored.

Decision 5: question banks or questions on the assessment

Questions can be held in reusable banks and shared across assessments, or written on a single assessment.

Use a bank where the same material is assessed in more than one place — it means correcting a badly worded question once rather than hunting for every copy. Write directly on the assessment for something genuinely one-off.

Decision 6: what needs a human to grade

Question types differ in whether a machine can score them. Multiple choice and similar types are scored automatically; essays and open responses need a grader, and a rubric is what keeps different graders consistent.

Every open question you add is grading work for somebody. Decide who does it before you build an assessment that generates a queue nobody owns.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
Pass mark, after people have sat it	Highest. Earlier results were judged against a different bar.
Attempt limit	High. Someone who exhausted attempts under the old limit is stuck.
Adding proctoring to an existing assessment	High. It changes what is collected about people.
Time limit	Medium.
Moving questions into a bank	Medium, and worth doing early.

What happens next

Build the question banks and rubrics you need, then create the assessment and add its questions. An assessment cannot be published until it has at least one question, and a learner cannot sit it until they are assigned it.