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).

However, when I do give in-class examinations, they are always untimed, in line with the majority of students' examination preferences (Onwuegbuzie, 2000). Such examinations are typically worth approximately 20% of the overall grade. These examination forms, which are usually administered at the midterm and final stages of the course, consist of open-ended questions, involving items that require knowledge of the statistical process. More specifically, the examination forms consist of open-ended questions of two types, computational (e.g., "construct a two-sided confidence interval for the comparison of interest") and conceptual (e.g., "is the equal variance or unequal variance test more powerful for these data? Give reasons for your answer"). All of the items in the midterm examination form pertain to content from the first half of the course and are chosen from the instructor's item bank to ensure that the examination is typical of past examinations given by me. The final examination also is constructed by me and parallels the format of the midterm examination, yet covers the complete course content. As noted earlier, both the midterm and the final examination are administered under untimed conditions, and utilize open-book and open-notes format. My examinations are scored on a 100-point scale by me, using a key that specifies the number of points awarded for both correct and partial-credit answers. Because I administer untimed examinations, I expect all my students to finish my examinations to the best of their abilities. Although useful, I do not believe that in-class examinations reflect students' abilities to the extent that performance assessments and authentic assessments do. Because my in-class examinations allow open-book and open-notes, cheating is rarely an issue. Thus, I do not take extra safeguards to minimize student cheating (e.g., seating arrangements, multiple versions of exams).