Blackboard Support

Creating Tests

Essay

Essay questions are relatively easy to create and use, but because they are ‘open’ questions, the answers cannot be assessed automatically. This means they need to be assessed by the examiner. For essay questions, students will typically insert a text of significant length into the answer box.

  • Select the Essay question type.
  • If desired, you can give the question a title in the Question Title field.
  • Formulate the question in the Question Text field.

    Because all options are selected in the Question Settings (see Specifying settings for the test questions), files, images and hyperlinks can be added to the question. You can use the File, External Link and Link Name fields for this.
  • In the Answer field, you can provide a sample answer.
  •  Under Rubrics, a question can be added to a category (rubric).
  •  Under Categories and Keywords, metadata can be added. This data can later be used for searching and selecting.
     
  • Finally, under Instructor Notes, extra information can be added that will only be visible to the instructors.
  • Click on Submit to save the question.