Often, the teaching and writing parts of our jobs are joyous, challenging, and inspiring. Grading, however, is never joyous, and it can be painful if our students do not perform as well as we had hoped. So, this week’s tidbit offers seven suggestions for creating good and fair final exams. My next post will suggest some radical ideas for exams.
1. Test What You Teach. Start by reviewing what were the important things you taught. Good exams are congruent with our learning goals and what we emphasized in class. This principle also means that major course topics should count more towards students’ grades than minor ones. Congruency makes our exams fairer, of course, but, even more importantly, it makes our conclusions about grades more accurate.
2. Describe in Writing What You Are Looking For. Provide your grading criteria to your students well before the exam, ideally in a detailed rubric and ideally at the start of your course. (If you haven’t done so by now, don’t panic. You can start this practice next time you teach the course.)
3. Write Fair Exam Questions. Having decided what you are testing, draft your questions. Avoid humor and cultural references students may not know. Try not to include anything that will agitate or distract some or even a few of the students; we don’t want students asking themselves, as they take the exam, “Why did this jerk include _________ in the exam?”
4. Take Your Own Test. Answer in full each question as if you were a student in your class. Time yourself. Assume your students will require twice as much time as you did and revise your questions so that they can be completed in the time allocated.
5. Get Feedback on Your Draft Exam. Show your draft exam questions and answers to a colleague, ideally someone who also teaches your subject. A colleague can catch editing errors (Did you change a party’s name in one place but not everywhere?), omissions (Did you leave out a fact intentionally?), unfair assumptions (Did you assume your students understand some aspect of the business world you did not teach?), and typos.
6. Revise Your Exam. Revise your exam in light of the feedback. Have someone check to make sure your revisions did not introduce new errors.
7. Write and Share Your Instructions Well Before the Exam. Write your instructions; be very precise about what you want. Give the instructions to your students a few weeks before the exam, and answer questions about them. This choice allows students to focus their exam time and mental energy on the exam and not on the instructions.
