Answer Key Standard

  • 10th Aug 2020
    •  • 
  • 2 min read

As I’ve written about before, those of us who make assessments for training need to keep an answer key for those assessments. This is not optional, it is a hard requirement of anyone in Learning & Development who takes their work seriously.

Still, most Instructional Designers don’t do this. Most don’t even know how because no one ever told them how. Well, no one ever told me how either, so I made one up. This is what I do, and I’m wide open to ways of improving it. Please use the comments to tell me if you have a better way.

Now I say plaintext, but these days I’m trending more toward Markdown, which I consider the same thing. A “.MD” file is just a textfile with some basic formatting notation. If you want to learn Markdown, it’s super simple. Here’s a good resource.

Key to the Key (aka Legend)

  • LO = learning objective
  • CL = content location(s)
  • FI = incorrect feedback displayed to learner
  • FC = correct feedback displayed to learner
  • QS = single choice question (3 radio buttons)
  • QM = multi-select question (3–5 checkboxes)
  • QF = fill in the blank question (text entry)
  • QP = pairing/matching question (3–5 drag & drop selections)
  • + = correct answer
  • - = incorrect answer

  • = seperator for matching pairs in a pairing question

Example
QS #85876
LO Demonstrate how a single choice question works in this standard
CL https://sam-rogers.com/AnswerKeyStandard
FI If you try again you have a 50% chance of getting this right!
FC Nice! Thanks for playing.
+ This is the correct answer
– This is the wrong answer
– This answer is also incorrect

Got something better? Lemme know, would you please?