Answers · Assignments

What to write in Instructions, and what to attach

Both go to your students, and both are read by the interviewer as background. The questions themselves always come from each student's own submission.

838 reads

The Instructions box does two jobs at once. Everything in it (the text you write and the files you attach) is shared with your students, and the same text and files are given to the AI interviewer as background. This page says exactly what that means, because the distinction matters.

What to write

Write the task as you would on a syllabus: what to produce, how long, what to cite, what matters. Viva reads your instructions as the definition of the task, so specific instructions produce sharper questions. "Write a 1,000-word essay on carbon taxes citing three peer-reviewed sources" gives the interviewer far more to work with than "essay 3".

What to attach

Attach what you would hand out in class: the case or reading the work is based on, a prompt sheet, a worked example. Students can download the files from the assignment. The interviewer also reads them as background, so when a student's essay engages with the case, the follow-up questions know what the case actually says.

The questions still come from the submission

Reference material never becomes the interview. Viva generates questions from each student's own submission (that is why a prepared script does not survive them), and a built-in check discards any question that is answerable from the attached material alone. Attachments sharpen the conversation; they do not redirect it.

Up to 5 files. Long documents are fine: Viva distills them into a working summary that covers every file, so a 60-page case does not need trimming first.
Your grading criteria go somewhere else. The Grading rubric section further down the assignment form is what Viva marks against, so a rubric does not need to be attached here.
No attachments is also fine. Viva interviews on the submission itself, so it works with nothing attached at all.
If you want the interview to be about course material rather than about a submission, that is a different mode: use "Set up an oral exam on course material instead" at the top of the assignment form.