How to Write an Exam

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk with you about how to write an exam. I'm really going to talk to you about how to write and and not to write an exam. The do's and don'ts of writing an exam. Number one do not try to trick your students. As far as material that you are going to put on the exam only put material on the exam that you have covered in class. Even if you have asked them to read a chapter from a book, it is my opinion that if you did not talk about it in class it should not be in their test. Ok so don't put any kind of you know trickery to your exam. Number two use your tests, do use your tests to make students come to class. If you write your own exams instead of taking them from sort of a pre-determined multiple choice kind of thing that you've been handed. If you make your own exams and you cover material in class that you are going to put on the test the students will need to come to class in order to do well on the exam. So make the exam something that go along with the class and it's not something that it is a separate part. Number three don't make the test too long. I've seen many,many exams that contain a wide variety of questions but total out to some two hundred questions that are all one point a piece. I think that this tires students out and I think that exams should be short and sweet but also contain a variety of different questions so for example if a student is not as good at writing essays as other students, he or she will do better on matching portions of the exam or short answers, or fill in the blank. Things like this. Where as people who are better at writing will do better with writing portions so sort of take your exam and mix in different kinds of questions where appropriate. And make sure it's not too long, and make sure that the grading of the exam is going to be easy for you to do and easy for the student to understand. And those are my do's and don'ts of writing an exam."