Use of Exams Are "exams" a component of your students' course grade? What percentage of the overall grade are from exams? What is the format of your main exams? Would you characterize these exams as mostly multiple choice, short answer, longer answer questions, or some mixture?
Are these in-class exams or take-home exams?
What time restrictions do you place on the exams?
How many students do you expect to finish in the time allotted?
Why do you use exams? Do you feel exams are an important reflection of students' abilities?
Do you take any safeguards to try to minimize student cheating? Please describe the concern and how you respond (e.g., seating arrangements, multiple versions of exams).
I usually give two midterm exams and one comprehensive final. Exams are typically 15% of the overall course grade with the final sometimes weighted more heavily. The questions are a mixture of short-response and longer questions, with a mixture of computation (often with access to a computer) as well as interpretation and explanation. The midterms are given in class, usually for 50 or 70 minutes. I would like students to have sufficient time to finish, but this is very difficult to manage with this time requirement and some will complain about the time constraint. When I previously taught on the semester system, a component of the final exam was take home, providing students with more time and access to their notes. (There were numerous versions of the take home component, students were given different data sets and asked 2-3 data analysis and inference questions about the dataset.) I don't usually give multiple versions of in-class exams except if I have multiple sections on different days. With the amount of writing and explanation students are required to do, I hope that copying of numerical answers is not advantageous. Other assessment components in the course allow more time and more collaboration. My goal on exams is to see if the students can apply their knowledge, fairly quickly, and demonstrate individual understanding of important concepts.