Short Answer Questions (SAQs)
Short answer questions (SAQs) tend to be open-ended questions (in contrast to MCQ) and are designed to elicit a direct response from students.
SAQs can be used to check knowledge and understanding, support engagement with academic literature or a particular case study and to encourage a progressive form of learning.
They can be used in both formative and summative assessment.
SAQs may take a range of different forms such as short descriptive or qualitative single sentence answers, diagrams or graphs with explanations, filling in missing words in a sentence or a list of answers.
Depending on the type of question, marking may simply involve checking against a list of correct answers.
Alternatively a set of criteria may be used based on:
- factual knowledge about a topic: have the questions been answered correctly?
- numerical answers: will marks be given on the process as well as the product answer?
- writing style: importance of language, structure, accuracy of grammar and spelling?
How to design good questions:
- express the questions in clear language
- ensure there is only one correct answer per question
- state how the question should be answered
- direct questions are better than the sentence completion
- for numerical questions, be clear about marks for process as well as product and whether units are part of the answer
Be prepared to accept other answers; some of which you may not have predicted.