Teachers wrapping up a unit built around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tend to default to an argumentative essay as the culminating assessment, which is often a reasonable choice but not always the best one depending on what specific learning goals the unit was actually built to achieve. A unit primarily focused on comprehension of the book's historical and scientific content might be better served by a shorter written test with some open response components, while a unit primarily focused on ethical reasoning and argumentation genuinely does need the sustained space an essay provides. Making this choice deliberately, based on the unit's actual primary goals, rather than defaulting to whatever assessment format is most familiar, produces a better match between what is taught and what is measured.

A useful exercise before finalizing the assessment format is listing the unit's three or four most important learning objectives explicitly, then checking each objective against the assessment format being considered to see whether that format can actually measure it well. An objective like "students can explain the scientific significance of HeLa cells" can be measured efficiently through a short answer test question, while an objective like "students can construct a nuanced ethical argument acknowledging competing considerations" genuinely requires the sustained reasoning space an essay provides and cannot be adequately captured through a short answer or multiple choice format. Mismatches between objectives and assessment format are a common source of both grading frustration and student learning that goes unmeasured despite genuinely occurring during the unit.

For units with genuinely mixed objectives, a hybrid assessment, combining a shorter test section covering factual and comprehension content with a shorter, more focused essay section covering ethical reasoning, sometimes serves the unit's full range of goals better than either a pure essay or a pure test would alone. This hybrid approach does add some grading complexity, since it requires two different grading approaches within a single assessment, but it can also reduce overall grading time compared to a full length essay, since the comprehension portion can be graded quickly using an answer key while only the shorter essay portion requires the more time intensive qualitative evaluation a full essay would otherwise demand.

Designing the Comprehension Component

If a hybrid or pure test format is chosen, the comprehension component should avoid pure recall questions that reward memorization of dates and names over genuine understanding of the material's significance, since recall-focused questions tend to produce the shallowest possible engagement with a book that has much more to offer than a list of facts to memorize. Questions that ask students to explain the significance of a fact, rather than simply state it, such as "why did the immortality of HeLa cells matter for medical research" rather than simply "what year were HeLa cells isolated," test genuine comprehension more effectively while still being efficient to grade using a fairly straightforward answer key that a teacher or even a teaching assistant can apply consistently.

• List the unit's core learning objectives before choosing an assessment format
• Match sustained ethical reasoning objectives to an essay, factual objectives to a shorter test
• Consider a hybrid format for units with genuinely mixed comprehension and reasoning goals
• Write comprehension questions that require explaining significance, not just recalling facts
• Grade the comprehension and reasoning components separately, even within a single assessment

Time Efficiency Tradeoffs Across Formats

From a pure grading efficiency standpoint, a well designed test with clear right answers is significantly faster to grade than an essay, which matters practically for teachers managing multiple sections and a full course load beyond just this single unit. But this efficiency gain comes at a real cost if the unit's most important goals genuinely require essay-length reasoning to assess accurately, since a fast but poorly matched assessment format produces grades that do not actually reflect whether students achieved the unit's real learning goals. Teachers need to weigh this tradeoff honestly rather than letting grading time pressure alone dictate the assessment format, since a slightly slower but better matched assessment often produces more useful information about student learning than a faster one that measures the wrong thing.

One middle ground worth considering is a shorter essay than teachers might otherwise assign, perhaps two paragraphs instead of a full multi-page essay, which still requires the sustained reasoning an essay format provides while being genuinely faster to grade than a longer version would be. This shorter essay format works particularly well for units where ethical reasoning is one goal among several rather than the single dominant focus, allowing that reasoning to still be assessed meaningfully without consuming the disproportionate amount of grading time a full length essay would require relative to its weight within the unit's broader set of objectives.

Communicating the Assessment Choice to Students

Whatever format is chosen, students benefit from understanding why that particular format was selected, since knowing that an essay was chosen specifically because the unit prioritized ethical reasoning, for instance, helps students understand what kind of preparation and thinking the assessment actually requires rather than simply preparing generically for "the test" or "the essay" without a clear sense of what is actually being measured. A brief explanation early in the unit, connecting the eventual assessment format back to the unit's stated learning goals, also helps students see assessment as a genuine measurement of learning rather than an arbitrary hurdle disconnected from what they were actually taught and asked to practice throughout the unit.

This transparency also tends to reduce student anxiety somewhat, since a clearly explained rationale for an assessment format gives students a concrete sense of what to prepare for and why, rather than facing an assessment that feels arbitrary or disconnected from the actual classroom experience of the unit. Teachers who consistently explain their assessment design choices across multiple units, not just this one, tend to build a classroom culture where students trust that assessments genuinely reflect what was taught, which is valuable well beyond any single unit on any single book.