In the Sim and in the aircraft doing training....to assess basic instrument flying skills I used a simple method.
I fabricated a false narrative....saying we would start each session with a quick warm up period of a few minutes then get into the training...and explained we would do some simple turns, climbs, descents etc....and a quick "unusual attitude recovery".
For the unusual attitude segment I would perform the tried and true routine of having the trainee close their eyes....and I would put the aircraft through some gyrations...just enough to get them to think I was setting them up in a bank, climb, side slip or something with an odd power setting for that situation.
What I was really doing was setting them up for something far more telling.....with the fellow's eyes closed I would reach over and adjust his ADI into a ten degree bank one way or another then start the maneuvering and when I turned the flight controls over him...I had the aircraft dead flat level but recovering from a dive so the airspeed would be. higher than normal...and a power setting picked at random....but remember the Pilot's ADI would be showing a bank due to the offset I had put onto his display.
Mind you this was always in a Sim or Aircraft that had three ADI's.....one for each Pilot and the Standby/Emergency ADI. Two of the three would be showing the same and actual attitude of the aircraft.
Some guys never got the aircraft stabilized...some got it stabilized and announced the ADI problem but never cross checked the other two ADI's.
Some immediately polled the jury by looking at all of the panel to see if there had been some sort of instrument failure.
My question to some was...."Do you fly Instruments or just the ADI?".
The Teaching Point was to use everything you have available while recovering control of the aircraft....try to figure out what was going on well enough to keep the aircraft flying.
The other interesting thing was to watch a crew crash with some sort of malfunction... something relatively mundane then turn around and have them put the Autopilot to work and watch it fly an approach to the same runway with the same malfunction without crashing.
Not that the Sim exactly replicates a failure or aircraft response but to remind Pilots that sometimes getting distracted can cause you more harm than the actual malfunction or problem.