Before conducting an assessment, it's important to create assessment templates relevant to you and your clients' needs. This article walks you through building an assessment template.

Navigating to assessment templates

1. Click your account name in the upper left corner of any page.
2. Click Account Settings.
3. In the Features section, click Assessments.

Selecting a template

The Assessment templates page shows every template available to you, grouped into two collapsible sections: ScalePad and Custom. To narrow the list to just one source, click Filter > Source and select ScalePad, Custom, or both.

From here, you can either:

• Click + New template to create a new template from scratch, or import a JSON assessment template file.
• Click Edit template on a Custom template's card to edit it.

Adding categories

Each template is divided into categories, making it easier to track specific areas of interest when conducting the assessment. Example categories include Hardware, Security, or Policies, but you can set them up however makes sense for your use case.

To add a category, click Add Category, then enter a name and, optionally, a description in the Add a description (optional) field. To remove a category, click its overflow menu (...) and click the remove option.

You can also select a weight when you have multiple categories. All of the categories in an assessment must have a combined weight of 100%. Weights are used to determine the importance of each category.

Adding items

1. In a category, click the inline add-item row and enter a title for the new item.
2. Choose the response type. For details, see Configuring responses for assessment items
3. Choose the weight for the item within its category. (All item weights in a category must add up to 100% in order to save the template)
4. Click the drawer icon next to the item to open its details panel for further configuration options:
   • Title: the item's title.
   • Description: a short description of the item.
   • Scoring Instructions: how the assessor should evaluate this item.
   • Remediation: extra information on how this item can be resolved.
   • Tags: tags applied to this item.
   • Type: the type of response expected.
   • Weight: the item's weight within its category.

Applying weight to categories and items

Weights control how much each category and item affects the final assessment score. For more on how weighting works, see About weighting in assessments.

By default, weight is spread evenly across all categories, but you can adjust it depending on your needs. As long as the total weight across all categories adds up to 100%, you can distribute weights however you want.

To adjust a category's weight, click into its weight field and enter a percentage. Adjust your other category weights as needed so the total still adds up to 100%.

To adjust an item's weight, click into its weight field within the category and enter a percentage. While combined category scores affect the assessment score, item scores affect the category they belong to, so adjust the other item weights in that category so the total still adds up to 100%.

Display

Click Display to Collapse All Categories or Collapse all Items at once, to get a quicker overview of the template's structure.

Saving your template

Changes to a Custom template save automatically.

To keep a template's original version intact while working on changes, duplicate it first using Duplicate template, then edit the copy.

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