{"id":11398,"date":"2012-12-10T10:07:22","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T15:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=11398"},"modified":"2026-05-06T13:28:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:28:23","slug":"edc-blog-winding-down-and-bringing-it-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2012\/edc-blog-winding-down-and-bringing-it-together\/","title":{"rendered":"EDC Blog: Winding Down and Bringing It Together"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n EDC Blog: Winding Down and Bringing It Together\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

By: Samah Sabra<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my biggest challenges as an instructor has been learning that the end of the semester never comes with as much \u201cextra\u201d time as I hope it will. While I always want it to be a time to wind down from constant prep and emails \u2013 perhaps a bit of a hold-over from my days as an undergraduate student \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> and today, I return to the question of how to ensure exams do not seem \u201cuseless\u201d to students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 or summative assessments more generally \u2013 that students will perceive to be fair and useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alignment is a big piece in course design<\/a> and can offer a great deal of guidance to students. It also requires that we plan our courses around specific learning outcomes<\/a> and that we make these clear to students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, this means that when I frame a course in relation to specific learning outcomes, I\u2019m 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 \u201cbig picture\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cextra\u201d time as I hope it will. While I always want it to be a time to wind down from constant prep and emails \u2013 perhaps a bit of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40900,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11398\/revisions\/40900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}