College Students Want to Meet to Review for Exam

Student playing with headphone cord while studying

While nosotros often retrieve of exams equally a style to test students' comprehension of cloth, exams can serve more than than 1 purpose. Existence aware of why we are testing students and what exactly we want to test can assistance make students' and instructors' feel of exams more useful. The following tips will gear you towards problems you should think almost during the entire exam process, from planning to reflection.

Before you start preparing an examination

Why are y'all giving an exam to your students?

To evaluate and grade students. Exams provide a controlled environs for independent work and so are often used to verify students' learning.
To motivate students to study. Students tend to open their books more often when an evaluation is coming up. Exams can be smashing motivators.
To add diversity to student learning. Exams are a grade of learning action. They can enable students to see the material from a dissimilar perspective. They as well provide feedback that students tin then apply to improve their understanding.
To place weaknesses and right them. Exams enable both students and instructors to identify which areas of the material students do not understand. This allows students to seek aid, and instructors to accost areas that may need more attention, thus enabling student progression and improvement.
To obtain feedback on your didactics. You can use exams to evaluate your own teaching. Students' operation on the exam will pinpoint areas where yous should spend more than time or change your current approach.
To provide statistics for the class or institution. Institutions oft want information on how students are doing. How many are passing and declining, and what is the average achievement in class? Exams can provide this information.
To accredit qualified students. Sure professions demand that students demonstrate the acquisition of certain skills or knowledge. An test tin provide such proof – for example, the Uniform Concluding Test (UFE) serves this purpose in accounting.

What do you desire to assess?

What you desire to assess should be related to your learning outcomes for the course.

Knowledge or how it is used. You can design your test questions to assess students' knowledge or ability to apply material taught in form.
Process or product. You lot can test students' reasoning skills and evaluate the process by focusing the marks and other feedback on the process they follow to get in at a solution. Alternatively, yous can evaluate the end production.
The communication of ideas. Yous can evaluate students' communication skills their ability to limited themselves - whether this is by writing a cogent argument, or creating an elegant mathematical proof.
Convergent thinking or divergent thinking. Yous can exam your students' ability to depict a single conclusion from different inputs (convergent thinking). Or y'all may alternatively desire them to come up with unlike possible answers (divergent thinking). Do you expect different answers from students, or do you await all of them to provide the aforementioned answer?
Absolute or relative standards. Is student success defined by learning a set amount of fabric or demonstrating certain skills, or is student success measured by assessing the amount of progress the students brand over the elapsing of the course?

How do you decide what to test and how to test it?

The overall exam should be consistent with your learning outcomes for the class. At that place are a number of means to review and prioritize the skills and concepts taught in a course. You could:

Use the topics listing provided in your course outline
Skim through your lecture notes to find key concepts and methods
Review affiliate headings and subheadings in the assigned readings

What are the qualities of a good exam?

A good exam gives all students an equal opportunity to fully demonstrate their learning. With this in mind, you might reflect on the nature and parameters of your exam. For example, could the exam be administered equally a take-dwelling examination? Ii students might know the material equally well, but one of them might not perform well under the force per unit area of a timed or in-class testing situation. In such a instance, what is it that you actually want to appraise: how well each student knows the material, or how well each performs under pressure? Likewise, it might be advisable to allow students to bring memory aids to an exam. Again, what is it that you want to assess: their ability to memorize a formula or their ability to use and apply a formula?
Consistency. If you lot give the same exam twice to the same students, they should get a like course each time.
Validity. Make sure your questions accost what you desire to evaluate.
Realistic expectations. Your test should contain questions that match the average student's ability level. Information technology should too be possible to respond to all questions in the time allowed. To check the test, inquire a teaching assistant to take the exam – if they can't consummate it in well nether the time permitted so the exam needs to exist revised.
Uses multiple question types. Different students are better at different types of questions. In social club to allow all students to demonstrate their abilities, exams should include a variety of types of questions. Read our Educational activity Tip, Request Questions: six Types.
Offer multiple ways to obtain full marks. Exams can be highly stressful and bogus ways to demonstrate cognition. In recognition of this, you lot may want to provide questions that let multiple ways to obtain total marks. For instance, ask students to listing five of the seven benefits of multiple-selection questions.
Costless of bias. Your students will differ in many means including language proficiency, socio-economical groundwork, concrete disabilities, etc. When constructing an exam, you should go on student differences in mind to sentinel for ways that the exams could create obstacles for some students. For example, the use of vernacular linguistic communication could create difficulties for students whose outset linguistic communication is not English, and examples easily understood by Due north American students may be inaccessible to international students.
Redeemable. An exam does not demand to be the sole opportunity to obtain marks. Assignments and midterms allow students to practice answering your types of questions and adapt to your expectations.
Demanding. An test that is also easy does non accurately mensurate students' understanding of the material.
Transparent mark criteria. Students should know what is expected of them. They should be able to identify the characteristics of a satisfactory answer and understand the relative importance of those characteristics. This tin be achieved in many ways; you can provide feedback on assignments, depict your expectations in course, or post model solutions.
Timely. Spread exams out over the semester. Giving two exams one calendar week apart doesn't give students acceptable fourth dimension to receive and respond to the feedback provided past the showtime exam. When possible, plan the exams to fit logically inside the flow of the course material. Information technology might exist helpful to identify tests at the end of of import learning units rather than simply give a midterm halfway through the semester.
Accessible. For students with disabilities, exams must be amenable to adaptive technologies such as screen-readers or screen magnifiers. Exams that have visual content, such as charts, maps, and illustrations, may need to be rendered past Waterloo's AccessAbility Services into a format that meets an accommodation.

Afterward the exam is gear up

Prepare a mark scheme or rubric

Preparing a marking scheme ahead of time volition allow yous to review your questions, to verify that they are really testing the material you want to test, and to recollect about possible alternative answers that might come up.

Wait at what others have done. Chances are that you are not the only person who teaches this course. Wait at how others cull to assign grades.
Make a marking scheme usable past non-experts. Write a model answer and utilise this as the basis for a marking scheme usable by not-experts. This ensures that your teaching assistants and your students can hands empathize your mark scheme. It likewise allows you to accept an external examiner marking the response, if demand be. A rubric can be an constructive tool to help you or your instruction assistants assess student work speedily and accurately. Sharing the rubric with your students every bit they begin to study for the exam is also a good idea.
Give consequential marks. Generally, marking schemes should non penalize the same error repeatedly. If an mistake is made early merely carried through the answer, you should merely penalize information technology once if the rest of the response is sound.
Review the marking scheme after the test. Once the exam has been written, read a few answers and review your key. You lot may sometimes discover that students have interpreted your question in a manner that is different from what you lot had intended. Students may come up with excellent answers that may be slightly exterior of what was asked. Consider giving these students partial marks.
When marking, make notes on exams. These notes should brand information technology clear why yous gave a particular mark. If exams are returned to the students, your notes volition help them understand their mistakes and correct them. They will besides help yous should students want to review their exam long afterwards it has been given, or if they entreatment their grade.

Inform students of the purpose and parameters of the exam

Clearly communicate with students nearly what your goals are for whatever test or test. Don't presume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the exam or test is. Have a discussion about your goals and desired outcomes, and help students understand how specific aspects of the exam or exam fit these goals. Be open to making some changes if students have ideas to offer.
Point out the important sections in course plans, textbooks, and readings to guide test and exam grooming; where possible, provide multiple samples of tests and exam questions and answers. Consider conducting an exam review exercise.
Although you might not provide students with examination questions in accelerate, you should be prepared to answer questions such every bit:
- What volition the examination cover?
- How much emphasis should I put on the textbook / lectures / etc…?
- What textile (if any) am I immune to bring into the examination room?
- When will I get my marker?
- What happens if, for a good reason, I can't nourish the exam? Do I get to re-write?
- Will I be given the chance to choose the topics on which I do questions?
- Will I be told which criteria I am being assessed on?
- If I disagree politically or philosophically with the marking, will I become poor marks?
- Volition allowances be made if English is non my kickoff language?

After your students write the exam

Monitor the quality of your exams

Exams provide yous with the opportunity to obtain feedback on student learning, your teaching methods, and the quality of the test itself.

Write impressions on your exam and keep them. During the test and the marking of the exam, go on track of which questions seem to be well understood, and which questions were frequently misunderstood.
Collect numerical data. If you take machine-scorable exams, y'all tin go statistics on your questions, such every bit which questions were missed most ofttimes or which distracters were most often chosen. In other cases you can collect an overview of the marks.
Get student feedback. You tin can leave space specifically for feedback on exams, or yous tin obtain feedback in class after the exam. Consider request your students to complete an test wrapper – a brusk survey asking students about exam grooming strategies they used, what questions they plant hard to respond, and what they might practise differently to fix for the next exam (see our Teaching Tip on Educational activity Metacognitive Skills).

Reflect on the gathered information

Reviewing examination results tin help yous place concepts and methods that students are having difficulty with – questions that were missed – every bit well as concepts and methods that were well understood – questions mostly successfully answered. Or it may highlight well-synthetic or poorly constructed examination question. Consider using this information to:

Change how yous teach the remainder of the term
Cheque for comeback on specific topics or methods over a term
Redesign the form or the examination for future classes
Assess your pedagogy practice – what is working peculiarly well and what can be improved upon

Resource

Brownish, South., Race, P., & Smith, B. (1996). 500 tips on assessment. London, United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland: Kogan Page.
Brown, S., & Smith, B. (1997). Getting to grips with assessment. Birmingham, UK: staff and Educational Development Association.
McKeachie, W., & Svinicki, One thousand. (2013).McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for higher and university teachers (14^th ed.). Belmont, USA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Worthen, B. R., Borg, W.R., & White, Thou. R. (1993).Measurement and evaluation in the schools. New York: Longman.

CTE teaching tips

Test Questions: Types, Characteristics, and Suggestions
Designing Multiple-Choice Questions
Adjustment Outcomes, Assessments, and Pedagogy
Learner-Centered Assessment

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