Tests as research questions

The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is 42.  The answer doesn't make sense because the question was poorly posed.

Most tests are answers to a poorly posed question which is usually a variant on "how much have my students understood about X?"  The problem is the word "understood" which isn't clearly defined.
Therefore a test needs to be specific in its scope.  The question "can students read?"is meaningless because if a student gets all the answers right, it's entirely possible he still can't read, depending on what reading means in that specific context.  A six year-old may be able to identify letters while a 22 year-old may be able to read a medical journal.

Of course I will never know if she can read and understand ALL medical journals, so here's  the challenge: to create a test that isn't too long (so it's humanly possible to concentrate that long) yet comprehensive enough to give me an idea of what she can do. So what's MY research question? Can this student read scientific articles in medicine well enough to understand what the hypothesis was, what the results were and whether the methodology was sound.  Now that I can prepare a test for.