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Assessment: Take home/open book

Developing take home tests

Take home/open book tests work best when assessing based on the higher orders of Bloom’s Taxonomy (apply, analyze, evaluate create). Present some relevant content and then ask students to do something with it. Make sure to remind students of the learning outcomes and provide a marking rubric so they don’t get too far off topic. Encourage them to create notes, flashcards, or other study aids so they are not spending too much time looking things up. Remember, all the same principles of creating good test questions still apply.

Take home tests work well with:

  • multi-step questions that build on each other
  • questions that require students to draw on information from across the curriculum
  • authentic, “real world” application

Further reading