Final Exams

Before you settle on a particular genre of assessment, we recommend that you visit our pages on capstone assignments, writing effective assignment prompts, and sequencing and scaffolding.

Exams are one of the most common genres of capstone assignments, set at the end of units or courses in order to give students—and instructors—the opportunity to synthesize and reflect on the full arc of a unit and/or the semester. Well-designed exams allow students to demonstrate what they have learned in a course, and can reinforce students’ understanding. As with any type of assessment, instructors should align their exams with the concepts and skills that are most important in a course. Below, we provide guidance about designing, grading, and learning from exams, as well as preparing students to take exams.

Scheduling Exams

When planning to assess student learning through midterm or final exams, you'll want to consider the timing and frequency.

If exams are a staple of your overall assessment strategy, make sure to give an exam or quiz early enough in the term that students can understand course expectations and adjust their study strategies in response to your feedback.
Aim to give more frequent lower-stakes exams, rather than a few high-stakes exams. This encourages students to study regularly—which increases their learning— and decreases their anxiety. Additionally, including multiple lower-stakes assessments reduces the chance that a student will perform poorly overall due to misinterpreting a single question or having a bad day.

Writing Exams

When designing your exam, we recommend that you keep the following considerations in mind:

Exams should be comprehensive, covering a range of learning objectives from the unit—or the course—and with questions at a range of difficulty levels. Bloom’s Taxonomy can be helpful in evaluating the alignment between your objectives and the verbs you are using to prompt students.
Exams should test students on material covered and at cognitive levels that match what students have had the opportunity to develop and practice.
Be thoughtful about whether you would like your exams to be open-book versus closed-book. Is it important that students have committed concepts to memory? Are there benefits to allowing students access to their notes? Note that closed-book exams may lead to better long-term retention (Rummer et al, 2019).
Begin the exam with a few easier questions to help students feel confident.
Indicate point values for each question.
Allow yourself ample time to write, revise, and iterate your exam questions.

Question Types

Exam questions can be written in a variety of formats, and you may wish to incorporate several different types of questions. Below, we provide advice about a few common question types.

Essays

Essay questions can probe a range of levels of thinking, including higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You might ask questions in which students evaluate ideas, compare different theories, or propose new solutions, for example.
Be specific in your prompt.
Consider asking several shorter essay questions instead of one long one. This allows you to assess a broader range of material, and provides more opportunities for a student to show what they have learned.
Consider allowing students to choose among several essay questions.
Prior to the exam, you might provide several examples of potential essay questions so that students understand what to expect. Let students know that you may include one of the questions on the exam.
If essay writing itself is not your goal, consider breaking an essay into subsections, each with a discrete focus. (See McKeachie’s Teaching Tips).

Multiple choice questions

Because multiple choice questions are comparatively quick to answer, a test might contain a reasonable number of multiple-choice questions, allowing you to to assess a greater breadth of content.
In addition to recall and comprehension, well-written questions can assess higher level thinking—although they cannot address all learning objectives, such as the ability to create something new.
To probe higher-order thinking skills, ask a series of related questions about a piece of data, a case study, a poem, a quote, a passage, or any other realistic stimulus. Questions might ask students to solve problems based on this information, draw conclusions, make predictions, or generalize to an analogous situation.
Distractors (the wrong answers) should be plausible and should be a similar length as the correct answer.
The goal is not to trick your students. Be careful about using “always,” “never,” “all of the above,” and “none of the above,” which may lead to confusion without genuinely assessing students’ understanding. Try to avoid using negative wording.
While multiple choice questions often have four or five options, it is fine to use three if you aren’t able to generate additional plausible distractors.
If you are having a hard time writing distractors, consider asking an open-ended question instead.

Short answer

Short answer questions may be easier to write than multiple choice questions, as you don’t need to write multiple plausible distractors.
Because students need to generate answers in their own words, short-answer questions can help you to gauge a student’s level of understanding.

Problem solving

If problems require complex calculations that may be difficult to complete with limited time, consider asking students to outline how they would approach a problem without actually solving it.

True/False questions

True/False questions are most effective if students are asked to explain their answer and correct any incorrect statements. Otherwise, students may remember the wrong answer afterwards (Toppino and Brochim, 1989).

Testing the Exam

You’ll also want to make sure that you “stress test” your exam before using it to assess your students’ learning.

Ask your TFs or a colleague to take the exam before you finalize it. This will help identify any mistakes or points of confusion in the questions.
Calibrate the length by having a TF or colleague take the exam. A general rule of thumb is that students take three times longer than an experienced instructor to complete an exam. (This will vary depending on the subject matter and nature of the questions, including the difficulty of any calculations.)

Preparing Students for Exams

An exam shouldn’t be the first time your students encounter a particular format or genre of question. It also shouldn’t be the first time they receive feedback on how to answer those questions. Instead, just like in any other assignment, it is important to scaffold the kinds of intellectual work which students will be asked to perform on the exam, providing practice and feedback before summative moments. There are many ways to scaffold answering exam questions, including:

providing examples and demonstrating how you would answer them during lecture;
having students work together in groups during class to answer questions and then bringing the group together to go over the answers;
providing examples of questions, and asking students to write their own questions; and
giving students practice and feedback on answering exam questions in the form of formative quizzes.

In addition, you can help students prepare for exams in the following ways:

Give students advice about what to expect and how to study for the exam.
Provide practice exams or example essay questions. Encourage students to take the practice exams under conditions that mimic actual testing conditions (e.g. timed, without looking at notes or the answer key).
Ensure that students have had opportunities to practice—in class, on their own, and during review sessions—with material at a similar level of difficulty as what they will encounter on the exam.

Grading Exams

When you write the exam, also write a detailed solution key and/or rubric, including how you will assign partial credit.
Reward what you value. For each question, is it important that students recall key information? Identify an effective approach? Integrate or evaluate ideas? Assign point values based on your key learning objectives.
Read through a number of exams before you begin grading. Based on student responses, make adjustments to your rubric. If you are grading as a team, come to consensus about how to respond to different examples of student work.
Each question should be graded by the same person, or small group of people. This ensures consistency and also decreases the likelihood of bias.
Minimize bias by not looking at students’ names when grading exams.

Learning from Exams

Pay attention to how students performed on each question.
Note common challenges, and discuss these with your students following the exam.
If you realize that students did not learn certain concepts as well as you would have liked, you may wish to adjust how you teach the material in the future.
If students performed poorly on particular questions, was this due to the wording of the question? This may inform modifications that you make to your exams in future iterations.