Document and Slide Production Assessment for Office and Client-Facing WorkHow much polish does it actually need?

Methodology: Thirty-four original exercises in five formats: twelve single-choice production calls in which every situation offers the same four-rung ladder of effort, six select-every-that-applies exercises, six true-or-false claims, five matching exercises and five ordering exercises. One response instruction is declared for the whole instrument and it is a KNOWLEDGE instruction: what the artefact needs before it goes to its reader, never what the respondent would personally do. Construct statement: it measures whether somebody knows what a document, slide deck or table needs before it reaches its reader, in any office suite, and whether they can match the amount of production effort to what the situation warrants; it does not measure writing quality, visual taste, speed in any particular software, knowledge of any menu or shortcut, or fitness for any role. Scoring is a warranted-level match. Each of the twelve production calls carries the effort level it warrants, and credit is read from a published four-by-four table, warranted level by chosen level. The table is asymmetric on purpose: it is a value judgement that over-polishing an internal note costs a morning while under-polishing a client artefact costs the client, and its rows were chosen numerically so that every column has the same mean across the twelve calls as authored. That property is asserted in the report builder and printed on the report, and it is what makes every fixed habit - always send, always tidy, always rebuild, always start again - score identically and behind a respondent who reads each case. The twenty-two supporting exercises are scored as keyed accuracy and set partial credit. Every figure is chance-corrected against a declared answer prior authored on every option, never against a uniform draw; the priors are named on the report and will be replaced by observed shares once data exists. Reliability is McDonald's omega estimated from item count and a stated assumed inter-item correlation of .22; a part whose omega falls below .70 carries a three-way placement and no number, and that refusal is printed rather than performed silently. Every reported figure carries its 68 and 95 per cent bands drawn as a ribbon, and the re-measurement threshold that would count as real change is printed with them. Sources: the assertion-evidence slide structure and its comprehension evidence (Alley and Neeley 2005, Technical Communication; Garner and Alley 2013, International Journal of Engineering Education); the multimedia learning principles of coherence, signalling and redundancy (Mayer 2009, Multimedia Learning, 2nd ed.); cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres and Kalyuga 2011, Cognitive Load Theory); the eight psychological principles for slides and the flaw analysis built on them (Kosslyn 2007, Clear and to the Point; Kosslyn, Kievit, Russell and Shephard 2012, Frontiers in Psychology, on presentation flaws and failures); the critique of the slide medium's cognitive style (Tufte 2006, the essay on the cognitive style of presentation software - the product named in the essay's title is a trademark of its owner and is cited here as a published source only); graphical perception and the ranking of visual encodings (Cleveland and McGill 1984, Journal of the American Statistical Association); table and graph design for communication (Few 2012, Show Me the Numbers, 2nd ed.); document design research (Schriver 1997, Dynamics in Document Design); the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (W3C 2023) for alt text, use of colour, contrast and reading order; the tagged-PDF accessibility standard ISO 14289-1 (PDF/UA); the typographic principles of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity (Williams 2014, The Non-Designer's Design Book, 4th ed.); implementation intentions for the one-change action (Gollwitzer and Sheeran 2006, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology); item-writing guidelines (Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez 2002, Applied Measurement in Education); and coefficient omega (McDonald 1999, Test Theory). No item names a software suite, a menu path, a keyboard shortcut or a version, and the keys hold in every mainstream office suite. All items are original works. No vendor's training material, certification, instrument or report layout is reproduced or implied, and no affiliation with or endorsement by any software vendor, certification body or publisher exists or is claimed.