Prompt sheet
Centering human expertise in assignment design. Dr. Angela Lanier and Daniel Umana.
Course and level
What it assesses
Your students, typically
What they struggle with
Non-negotiable
It makes many versions of one thing. You become the expert evaluator.
01 Three tiers of one assignment
Here is my assignment and its learning outcome [upload assignment]. Produce three versions that assess the same outcome at three levels of scaffolding: (1) heavy structure with a template and a worked example, (2) moderate structure with milestones only, (3) open ended. Do not change the outcome. Flag any version that measures something different.
Watch for: Scaffolding that removes the thinking. If tier 1 can be finished by filling blanks, it stopped measuring the outcome.
02 A discussion prompt bank for the whole unit
Unit topic: [X]. Students: [level and course]. The misconception I see every term: [Y]. Write 10 discussion prompts, each tagged to one level of the revised Bloom's taxonomy. At least 4 must sit at Evaluate or Create. Each must be answerable in 150 words and must have no single correct answer.
Watch for: Prompts that sound deep but have one obvious answer. If you can answer it in a sentence, so can they.
Your content is the source of truth, so the risk of invention drops sharply.
03 Lecture notes into a student study guide
Here are my lecture notes [upload]. Build a two-page student study guide made of 15 retrieval questions, ordered from basic recall to application, plus a short key terms list. Put all answers on a separate page. Use only content in my notes. List anything you had to add.
Watch for: A beautiful summary. If students can reread it and feel ready, you built the low utility version.
04 A dense reading into a plain language brief
Rewrite this resource as a one page brief for first year community college students. Preserve every claim and every technical term, but define each term on first use. Then list the three passages you simplified the most and state exactly what nuance was lost.
Watch for: Silent deletion. Simplification drops qualifiers, and the qualifier is often the disciplinary point. Read the what was lost list first.
It holds a persona on request. That gives you a stand-in reader at 9pm when no colleague is available.
05 The confused student simulator
You are a first year student who has not attended my class. Read these assignment directions and answer only from what is written. List every question you would have to email me before you could start. Then list what you would have to guess, and what your guess would be. Do not use outside knowledge about how college assignments usually work.
Watch for: It knows too much. If it fills your gaps with general college knowledge instead of flagging them, tighten the instruction.
06 Rehearse the conversation you are dreading
Role play a student who believes a paper was graded unfairly. I will play the instructor. Run this twice: first as a student who is calm and reasonable, then as a student who is angry. Stay in character, push back when my reasoning is weak, and do not resolve too quickly. After ten exchanges in each run, stop and tell me which of my responses would have escalated the situation.
Watch for: Student privacy. Never paste a real name, grade, ID, or any identifying detail into a tool your institution has not approved for student data.
It will attack your own materials on request, with no ego about your syllabus and no fatigue.
07 Make it do your assignment
Attached are my assignment directions and my rubric. Complete the assignment the way a student would submit it. Do not explain your approach and do not give me tips. Then, in a separate section, score your own submission against my rubric and justify every score.
Watch for: Do not conclude your students are cheating, and do not reach for detection tools. Seven detectors flagged 61% of TOEFL essays by non native English writers as AI written (Liang et al., 2023).
Strong at finding structure buried in prose. Weak at judging whether that structure is right. You keep the judgment.
08 A rubric from an assignment that never had one
Here is my assignment and the learning outcome it serves. Build an analytic rubric with exactly 4 criteria and 4 performance levels. Every cell must describe something observable in the submitted work. Do not use the words good, excellent, adequate, or clearly anywhere in the rubric. Keep the whole rubric under 300 words.
Watch for: Fluent vagueness. Demonstrates sophisticated understanding is not observable. If two graders would split on a cell, rewrite the cell.
09 The alignment audit
Here are my course learning outcomes and everything in Unit 3: readings, activities, and graded work. Build a table with one row per outcome and columns for where it is taught, where it is practiced, and where it is assessed. Mark every gap. Then list outcomes assessed but never taught, and outcomes taught but never assessed.
Watch for: It will report alignment that is not there. Verify every cell where it claims a match.
It reads sixty things at once and does not get tired. This is the strength where it plainly beats you.
10 A discussion board into your opening five minutes
Below are anonymized student discussion posts from one week. Group them into the distinct lines of thinking present, no more than six, with a count for each. For each group, state the underlying assumption students are making and whether it is correct, partly correct, or wrong. Quote one representative sentence per group. Do not summarize the discussion overall.
Watch for: Strip names first. Then check the quotes against the source. A plausible quote it composed is worse than no quote at all.
Three activities you assign. Same rule as everything above: the thinking has to stay with the student.
11 AI output autopsyAssign to students
This response was generated by an AI tool. Mark every claim you believe is wrong, incomplete, or unsupported. For each one, cite the source that corrects it and explain in a sentence what the tool got structurally wrong, not just factually wrong.
Watch for: You have to know the errors before class. Mark your own answer key first or the discussion collapses.
12 Draft, interrogate, reviseAssign to students
Submit your draft first. Then ask an AI tool to critique it against the rubric for this assignment. Do not ask it to rewrite anything. Revise the draft yourself. Submit a log listing each piece of feedback, whether you took it, and why. Rejecting feedback with a good reason earns full credit.
Watch for: Draft first is the whole design. Without it, students generate and then reverse engineer a log, and nothing is learned.
13 Interview the expertAssign to students
Interview the AI as a [role] working in this field. Ask 8 questions you prepared in advance. Rate each answer trust, verify, or reject and say why. Push back on two answers and note whether it defended its position or simply agreed with you. Verify two claims against a real source and report what you found.
Watch for: Students accept confident answers in fields they do not know yet. Pair this with verification or it teaches the opposite of what you intended.
Never paste student work, names, grades, IDs, or accommodations into any AI tool. Confirm the green shield in Copilot Chat before using College information.