The MiniLesson free speaking and free writing items allows the teacher to set speaking/writing tasks for the student that will be automatically graded and feedback given to student. Example tasks could be:


  • Read the passage and summarise it in your own words.
  • Look at the picture and answer the following question.
  • Describe the place where you live.
  • What did you do yesterday?


A simple free speaking activity might look like this:


Instructions for AI

AI will evaluate and give feedback to the student based on prompts that you provide. The activity comes with several preset prompts that you can use for basic tasks. For tasks that require more detailed instructions you can edit the prompt text freely.



Detailed Instructions for AI

The grading and feedback instructions can contain placeholders that refer to other fields in the item settings. This helps to keep the prompt and the data inside it (eg picture description) separate while editing. Later the prompt can be re-used in other items, and you can just adjust the data inside it.


The variables that you can use: 

  • Custom AI Data 1 = {ai data1}
  • Custom AI Data 2 = {ai data2}
  • Topic = {topic}

Such a prompt might look like this:

The student is describing a picture. The picture depicts the following scene: {ai data1}

Give 2 points for each grammatically correct sentence that the student uses to describe part of the picture. Give 1 point if the sentence is almost correct.



How the grade is determined

The grade % calculation will be something like this:

Percentage score =   [i](Ai score) * [ii]( Total words used / Target word count [field] ) * [iii]Relevance


  1. AI score. The AI grade instructions should add points from 0, or remove points from the max , such that a great answer would equal the value set in the item's "Total marks" field.
  2. Word count score. This is calculated as a percentage of the total words used over the target word count. This is applied to the AI score so that an answer that is too short will be penalized. Set the item's "Target word count" to 0 if you dont want to factor word count into the grade calculation.
  3. Relevance. This is calculated as a percentage and applied to the current score to ensure that a grammatically perfect but irrelevant submission, is graded correctly. Relevance can be set to i) No relevance ii) Relevance to question iii) Relevance to model answer The system will not penalize heavily, or at all for minor irrelevance, which is hard to judge accurately.


NB It is not always clear how AI has followed the instructions to arrive at the AI Grade.  The results should only be used as a guideline or indicator of performance/ability. They should not be used as authoritative assessments.