Generating Assessment Variations with LLMs
Introduction: The Need for Assessment Variations
As an educator, you know that giving the same assessment to every student or class can lead to issues like cheating. Creating multiple versions of an assessment helps keep things fair and encourages proper understanding. However, making these variations by hand can be time-consuming and repetitive.
This is where LLMs can help. Once you have crafted a well-thought-out assessment, you can quickly generate new versions of it that test the same skills and knowledge. In this lesson, we will show you how to use LLMs to create assessment variations efficiently and effectively.
Key Elements to Keep Consistent Across Variations
Before we start building prompts, let’s quickly review what needs to stay the same when making assessment variations. This is important to ensure fairness and consistency for all students.
- Question Types: If your original assessment has multiple-choice, true/false, and short-answer questions, you might consider making each variation have the same types.
- Number of Questions: Each version should have the same number of questions.
- Skills/Knowledge Tested: Each question in the new version should test the same skill or concept as the original.
- Difficulty Level: The complexity of each question should be similar across all versions.
For example, if your original assessment asks about the musical alphabet, a variation should also ask about the musical alphabet, but in a slightly different way.
Crafting Effective Prompts for Generating Variations
Now, let’s build a prompt step by step to instruct the LLM to generate assessment variations.
Ask the LLM to create new versions. Be specific about how many variations you want.
Add Constraints for Consistency
To make sure the variations are fair and aligned, add clear constraints:
These constraints help the LLM avoid making questions that are too easy, too hard, or off-topic. Note how we utilize strict instructions with MUST.
