Authored by Dr. Leland Jaffe, Associate Dean and Professor, Published on March 2nd, 2024
Welcome to our latest blog post, dedicated to equipping educators with tips to master exam writing in 2024. As the backbone of assessing students’ understanding and analytical skills, writing test questions that stimulate critical thinking and appropriately assess learning objectives is critical. In this guide, we’ll delve into practical tips and strategies designed to enhance the quality and fairness of your exam questions, ultimately fostering a conducive environment for comprehensive assessment and student success. This post is dedicated to providing professors or other educators with exam writing tips to accurately assess student learning.
Who Is This Blog Post For?
Whether you’re a seasoned educator looking to refine your approach or a new teacher seeking guidance, this post is written to elevate your expertise in designing test questions that not only assess knowledge but also nurture the development of essential academic skills. Let’s get started!
Top 10 Exam Writing Tips for Educators
1. Define the Learning Objectives:
It’s a good idea to clearly outline the objectives or most important points you want to measure through your exam. This will guide the content and format of your items to accurately assess students’ learning. By articulating specific learning objectives, you can ensure that exam questions are aligned with the intended outcomes of instruction, focusing on the most essential knowledge, skills, and competencies of the course material. This alignment enhances the validity and relevance of the exam, helping to accurately measure students’ progress and achievement. Moreover, clearly defined learning objectives guide the selection of appropriate question formats and levels of difficulty, ensuring that the exam effectively evaluates students’ attainment of the desired learning outcomes. Further, by clearly defining the learning objectives, students will likely have more success with exam preparation/study strategies.
2. Use Clear and Concise Language:
Avoid ambiguous or confusing wording and use plain language that is easily understood by your students. Clear language ensures that students understand what is being asked of them, reducing confusion and preventing misinterpretation of the question. This clarity promotes fairness in assessment by ensuring that all students have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.
Additionally, unambiguous language helps to minimize errors and inaccuracies in student responses, leading to more accurate assessment outcomes on test day. Clear questions also facilitate efficient grading, as educators can easily evaluate student responses against the intended criteria. Overall, using unambiguous language in exam questions enhances assessments’ validity, reliability, and effectiveness, ultimately supporting student learning and academic success.
3. Avoid (Minimize) Negative Wording:
Negative phrasing can lead to confusion. If possible, rephrase items to have positive statements. While this takes more work as the teacher must think of wrong answers/distractors, this is the best way to design your questions and the test performance will be improved. A good test will minimize the number of questions that are worded in a negative form. For example, limit the number of questions that start with the phrase “All of the following are true except”.
4. Avoid Double Negatives:
They can be especially confusing. If you must use them, make sure they are necessary. Using double negatives in the stem of multiple-choice questions can lead to confusion and ambiguity for students, making it challenging for them to decipher the intended meaning of the question. This ambiguity may cause students to misinterpret the question and select incorrect answers, resulting in an inaccurate assessment of their understanding. Additionally, double negatives can unnecessarily increase cognitive load, requiring students to expend extra mental effort to parse the question accurately. To ensure clarity and fairness in assessments, it is advisable to avoid double negatives and use straightforward language in the stems of multiple-choice questions
5. Keep Questions Focused While Writing Exams:
Each item should assess one specific skill or concept. Avoid asking multiple questions within a single item. Asking too many concepts within a single multiple-choice question can pose several problems for students. Firstly, it increases the cognitive load by requiring students to process and comprehend multiple pieces of information simultaneously. This can overwhelm students and hinder their ability to accurately interpret and respond to the question.
Additionally, combining multiple concepts in a single question may lead to confusion or ambiguity, as students may struggle to discern which concepts are being assessed or how they relate to one another. Consequently, students may resort to guessing or providing incomplete or inaccurate responses, resulting in unreliable assessment outcomes. To mitigate these issues, it is advisable to keep multiple-choice questions focused on a single concept or skill to ensure clarity and facilitate a more accurate evaluation of students’ ability and understanding of the material.
6. Balance Difficulty:
Include a mix of easy, moderate, and challenging questions. Avoid making all items too easy or too difficult. The difficulty of an item is measured by the proportion value (p-value), which is an indicator of the percentage of students who answered the item correctly. The ideal range of the p-value is .30 – .70. Consider your learning objectives and Bloom’s taxonomy when crafting exam questions and determine the appropriate level of difficulty.
>.70 – too easy
<.30 – too hard
7. Ensure Reliability and Validity:
Items should measure what they are intended to measure (validity and produce consistent results (reliability). Reliability refers to the consistency and stability of exam scores over time and across different administrations. To assess reliability, educators can use techniques such as test-retest reliability or inter-rater reliability, which involve comparing scores obtained from multiple administrations or different raters. Validity, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which exam questions measure the intended learning outcomes. Validity can be assessed through content validity, criterion-related validity, or construct validity, which involves examining the alignment between exam questions and the content, skills, or constructs being assessed. By employing these methods, educators can ensure that exam questions are reliable, valid, and accurately assess students’ knowledge and abilities.
8. Avoid Tricky Questions During Exam Writing:
Items should be straightforward and not designed to trick or confuse the respondent. A good practice while reviewing your exam is to perform the “cover the options” exercise, which determines if the question can still be answered if the options are covered. Each distractor (wrong answer) used for a question should attract between 5% and 50% of students. Distractors < 5% and > 50% should be reviewed and changed.
9. Format Consistency:
Use a consistent format for all items to maintain uniformity. Ensure that response options are presented consistently. Maintaining format consistency when writing exams is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, consistent formatting helps students understand the structure and expectations of the exam, reducing confusion and anxiety. When questions are presented in a uniform format, students can focus their attention on the content rather than deciphering different question styles.
Further, format consistency promotes fairness and equity in assessment by ensuring that all students are evaluated using the same standards and criteria. This enhances the validity and reliability of exam results, as students are assessed consistently across different sections or versions of the exam. Furthermore, maintaining format consistency facilitates efficient grading and analysis of exam data, enabling educators to evaluate student performance accurately and provide meaningful feedback. Overall, adhering to consistent formatting guidelines enhances the overall quality and effectiveness of exams, benefiting both students and educators alike.
10. Avoid Guessable Patterns:
If using multiple-choice kinds of questions, avoid easily discernible patterns in the answers (e.g., always using “C” as the correct answer). Common flaws in answer options include:
- Too long of a correct answer (making the correct answer obvious). In this scenario, a very simple educated guess will direct the student to the right answer without actually knowing the content.
- Outlier answers
- Implausible option(s) (double check the distractors/incorrect answer choices for impossible options that don’t relate to the stem of the question).
- All of the above answer choices
Review Exam Item Performance Following the Assessment
Following the completion of the exam, it’s paramount to determine how well your items performed, to verify the reliability and validity of your exam, and also to continue to improve questions for future assessments. This is performed by a process called item discrimination, where a student’s performance on an individual question is compared to their overall performance on the entire exam. Exam software uses the top 27% (high performers) and the lowest 27% (low performers) to calculate the point biserial -rpb (Pearson’s item-to-total) correlation. This ranges from -1.00 to +1.00. A + rpb indicates that a student who scored well on the entire exam got the question correct and a – rpb score indicates that students who performed poorly on the entire exam got the item correct. A score of 0 means that high scorers performance = low scorers performance on an exam question.
Determining The Effectiveness of an Exam Question
Determining the effectiveness of an exam question requires carefully analyzing several key factors. Firstly, clarity is paramount. A well-tested question should be formulated clearly and concisely, ensuring that students can easily understand the task at hand. Ambiguity or vagueness can lead to misinterpretation, ultimately hindering the assessment of true knowledge. Additionally, the question should align with the learning objectives and the content covered in the course, ensuring that it assesses the intended skills and knowledge.
Balanced Difficulty and Student Feedback
The level of difficulty is another critical aspect; as a balanced exam should include questions that span various difficulty levels, allowing differentiation among students based on their mastery of the material being tested. Further, feedback from students and instructors can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of a question, allowing for continuous improvement in the assessment process year after year. Overall, a well-tested exam question serves as a reliable tool for evaluating a student’s understanding and application of the material.
What the difference between 1st order, 2nd order, and 3rd order questions:
First-order, second-order, and third-order multiple-choice questions vary in complexity and cognitive demand. First-order questions typically assess students’ recall of factual information or basic comprehension of concepts. They often have a single correct answer that can be directly retrieved from the text or material being studied.
In contrast, second-order questions require higher-level thinking skills, such as analysis, application, or synthesis (Higher level Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive skills). These higher order questions may involve interpreting information, making inferences, or applying concepts to new situations.
Third-order questions are the most complex and demanding, requiring critical thinking, evaluation, or creativity. They often involve synthesizing information from multiple sources, evaluating arguments or evidence, or generating original ideas or solutions. By incorporating a mix of first–, second-, and third-order questions into assessments, educators can effectively measure students’ depth of understanding and ability to apply knowledge in diverse contexts.
How long should my exam be?
The number of questions in a medical school exam can vary depending on factors such as the complexity of the material, the depth of understanding required, and the format of the questions. However, a common guideline is to allocate approximately 1-2 minutes per question for students to answer (USMLE exam provides about 1.5 minutes per question)
For a 90-minute exam, if we assume an average of 1.5 minutes per question, then there would be around 60 questions on the entire test. However, this number can be adjusted based on the specific circumstances and preferences of the instructor. It’s essential to strike a balance between providing enough questions to adequately assess students’ knowledge and skills while ensuring that the exam remains manageable within the allocated time frame. Additionally, exams may include a mix of question formats, such as multiple-choice, short-answer, or essay questions, which can also influence the total number of questions. Ultimately, the goal is to create an exam that effectively evaluates students’ understanding of the material while being fair and feasible within the given time constraints.
The Importance of Reviewing The Exam With Students After Its Completion
Reviewing an exam with students after it’s completed is essential. Firstly, it provides an opportunity for students to receive feedback on their performance, helping them identify areas of strength and areas needing improvement. This feedback promotes metacognition and self-reflection, enabling students to understand their learning progress and develop strategies for future success on the next exam. Additionally, review sessions after the exam allow students to clarify any misunderstandings or misconceptions they may have had during the assessment, fostering deeper comprehension of course material. Moreover, the review process promotes transparency and accountability in assessment practices, as it allows students to understand the rationale behind grading decisions and ensures fairness and consistency in evaluation. Ultimately, reviewing an exam with students is an effective way to enhance the learning experience, promote academic growth, and strengthen the teacher-student relationship.
Exam Writing Tips for Educators – Conclusion
In conclusion, mastering the art of crafting effective exam questions is an ongoing process that requires dedication, thoughtful consideration, and a commitment to fostering student success. By implementing the tips and strategies discussed in this blog post, educators can create assessments that go beyond testing rote memorization and instead encourage critical thinking and analysis. As we strive to prepare students for the challenges of the future, the role of well-designed exam questions becomes increasingly vital. Remember to continuously reflect on your assessment methods, adapt to the evolving educational landscape, and seek feedback from both students and colleagues. With these insights, educators can contribute to a learning environment that not only evaluates knowledge but also cultivates the essential skills that students need for lifelong success. Here’s to creating assessments that inspire growth, curiosity, and a passion for learning among our students. Good luck with your exam writing!
