- Exam Writing Process
Describe the PROCESS that you use to write an exam from scratch. For example, how do you get started? What steps do you go through? Do you
have another instructor review your questions? How do you decide if the exam is reasonable timewise? Also, after you have given an exam, how do
you decide for yourself if it was a good exam?
I ususally start by making a list of content areas that are covered by
the exam, and then for each list the concepts that I would like to
explore. For example, I might list linear regression as the content
topic and then the meaning of least squares and how to identify
potentially infouential observations as being among the concepts that I
want to test. Then for each topic, I try to come up with a reasonable
simple, but hopefully interesting context for the problem. As I
mentioned in earlier responses, I am an advocate of using real data and
strive to do that in in-class examples, homework problems, and project
assignements. Even so, I often use realistic rather than real data on
exams in order to be able to keep the contexts realively simple--given
the time constraints of an exam I don't want students to have to spend
an inordinate amount of time trying to understand the context. But,
context is essential; if there is no context, you can't evaluate a
students ability to interpret the results of statistical analyses.
Once I have a set of candidate questions, I start to worry about the
length of the exam, and pare down as seems warranted. I work through
the exam, and if I can complete it in 10 minutes or less, then I think
it is OK as a 50 minute exam for students. I don't usually have another
instructor review the exam, mainly because I am not always working far
enough ahead of time, but I probably ought to do this more often.
As far as deciding if, after all is said and done, it was a good exam
or not, I guess I don't really do any kind of formal analysis like some
of the others have suggested they do. Mainly, if most students are able
to finish the exam in the allotted time, I get a reasonable distribution
of scores, and I wasn't toooo depressed by the collection of responses
to any of the questions, I'm happy.
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