By: Samah Sabra
One of my biggest challenges as an instructor has been learning that the end of the semester never comes with as much “extra” time as I hope it will. While I always want it to be a time to wind down from constant prep and emails – perhaps a bit of a hold-over from my days as an undergraduate student – when December comes around, I am often reminded that what is now required is a reinvigorated focus. It is a time to make sure each course comes together as planned.
Aside from preparing exam reviews and trying to create the right conditions for students to enter into their exams feeling challenged, motivated and confident, a lot of time and dedication is required to create an exam that is fair to students, TAs and instructors. I recently blogged about exams and today, I return to the question of how to ensure exams do not seem “useless” to students.
From one year to the next, even if I am teaching a class I have taught before, I feel the need to take time to improve the final summative assessment piece, be it a paper, a take-home exam, or a scheduled end-of-term exam. The main things I have learned to look for when I prepare new exams are (1) alignment with learning outcomes, (2) feasibility of completion within the allotted time, and (3) diversity of types and difficulty of questions. I consider these three strategies as ways of creating exams – or summative assessments more generally – that students will perceive to be fair and useful.
Alignment is a big piece in course design and can offer a great deal of guidance to students. It also requires that we plan our courses around specific learning outcomes and that we make these clear to students.
When I first came across the idea of learning outcomes, I felt a little intimidated and unsure I could change the way I conceived the courses I taught. What I quickly realized, however, was that I already had implicit learning outcomes strung throughout my course outline. The tricks I had to learn were to make these explicit to myself and students and to use them to guide other elements of course design, and specifically assessments.
Ultimately, this means that when I frame a course in relation to specific learning outcomes, I’m already planning and making decisions about what assessments would be fair to utilize in that course. In keeping with this perspective, I often tell students that before they study for an exam, they should go back and read over their course syllabus. Doing so often provides a study guide, giving them a “big picture” into which they should be able to fit all of the reading they have done and lectures they have attended. Having a well-designed course should take a lot of the guess work out of assessments for instructors, TAs and students.