A HARVEST KERNEL WORKING SESSION . SEEDSTACKING
The Sponsored Answer Test
Rewrite one assignment in four moves, by hand, in about twenty minutes. You finish holding a rewritten prompt you can hand out this term.
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SEED . Put the real prompt on the table
Pick one assignment you will actually grade this term. Choose the one that asks students to recommend, compare, evaluate or choose. Paste the prompt exactly as your students see it, including the parts you are not proud of.
SPROUT . Write the answer you are worried about
This is the test and it is uncomfortable on purpose. In one paragraph, write the confident, plausible, well organised answer a student could hand in without having done the thinking. Do not write a bad answer. Write the good one. If you can write it in three minutes, the prompt is asking for a product rather than a process.
GROW . Add the three things that answer cannot supply
Each line below is a requirement you are adding to the prompt. Write it in the words your students will read, not in shorthand for yourself. A recommendation can be produced. A decision path has to be walked.
HARVEST . Read it back and name what you can now see
Read your rewritten prompt as a student would, then answer this in one or two sentences. This is the only field that decides whether the twenty minutes worked.
YOUR REWRITTEN ASSIGNMENT
Fill the fields above and your rewritten prompt assembles here.
That is one assignment
Look at what it took. One prompt, three added requirements, and a rubric line that has to move with them or the rewrite does nothing.
Now count the rest. Four or five assignments in this course ask for a recommendation, a comparison or a choice. You teach more than one section. You will do this again in January when the case study is stale, and the rubric has to be rewritten every time or the criteria drift away from the prompt.
The method is sound. The arithmetic is what stops people, usually around week three.
The Assessment Builder in the Faculty Toolkit does exactly this job at volume: assignments, rubrics and tagged question banks, written against your own Course Record so the criteria come out in your language and at your standard. Review first, always. Nothing reaches a student until you approve it.
And do the first one by hand anyway. You have just finished it. You now know what a good rewrite looks like, which is the only way to judge one you did not write yourself.