Assessment types

Updated 09 Oct 2023

An assignment is one or more readings and activities that students need to submit by a given date. Revel course materials often include a reading followed by a quiz or another assessment to reinforce student understanding. A reading and assessment pair is called a module.

An assessment is one or more questions, activities, or actions. When you assign an assessment, students can submit it to receive a score.

Both readings and assessments can be included in an assignment, and both appear in the Gradebook, but students usually submit only scorable activities such as assessments.

Depending on your course content and academic subject, your course may include these assessment types:

Module and chapter quizzes include a variety of question types, such as multiple-choice, sorting, and drag-and-drop.
Three kinds of writing assessments range from contemplative journal entries, to interactive shared writing discussions, to more complex writing assignments, such as essays or research papers.

Media activities help assess student understanding of course content using video quizzes.
Embedded concept checks, one or more questions that appear in readings, can help students assess their understanding of just-read content. Students typically earn one point for each correctly answered question.
Simulations, such as MyVirtualChild or MyVirtualTeen, let students complete activities that simulate raising a child.
IT-oriented simulations display IT and Help desk questions, with followup questions that adapt to each student's answers.
Practice questions and homework problems promote students mastery of a concept or skill. These assessment types are often unscored and allow unlimited tries.
Tests make students answer questions in the order you present them, rather than in any order. Unlike most other assessments, test scores appear in the gradebook only after the due date passes.
Dynamic study modules (DSMs) are sets of scorable study questions that adapt to student answers. They can help identify a student's knowledge gaps and improve content retention. Unlike most other assessments, scores for DSMs appear in the gradebook as students submit work.

Most courses include a handful of these assessment types. For example, economics courses may include multiple choice questions and questions with graphed answers; coding courses may have students write or debug code, and English courses may include several types of writing assessments.

Some courses let you assign both a number of points and a weight to assessment types. For example, you may weight all homework assessments at 10% of a student's overall score, and weight chapter tests at 30% of a student's overall score.

If your course uses weighted assessments, you can view and change them from the Settings > Course details page.

You view students' individual assessment scores as well as overall class scores on Grades pages.