when attempting to produce a correct program, what is the point of developing a test suite?

Student playing with headphone cord while studying

While we often think of exams as a way to test students' comprehension of material, exams can serve more one purpose. Being aware of why we are testing students and what exactly we want to test can help brand students' and instructors' experience of exams more useful. The following tips volition gear you lot towards issues you should remember about during the entire exam process, from planning to reflection.

Before you start preparing an exam

Why are you giving an exam to your students?

To evaluate and form students. Exams provide a controlled environment for independent piece of work and so are often used to verify students' learning.
To motivate students to study. Students tend to open their books more oftentimes when an evaluation is coming up. Exams can be great motivators.
To add diverseness to student learning. Exams are a form of learning activeness. They tin enable students to see the cloth from a unlike perspective. They likewise provide feedback that students can and so use to improve their understanding.
To identify weaknesses and correct them. Exams enable both students and instructors to identify which areas of the material students do not empathise. This allows students to seek help, and instructors to address areas that may need more attention, thus enabling student progression and improvement.
To obtain feedback on your teaching. Yous can utilise exams to evaluate your own instruction. Students' performance on the test will pinpoint areas where you should spend more than time or change your electric current approach.
To provide statistics for the form or institution. Institutions often want data on how students are doing. How many are passing and failing, and what is the average achievement in class? Exams can provide this information.
To accredit qualified students. Certain professions demand that students demonstrate the acquisition of sure skills or knowledge. An test can provide such proof – for example, the Uniform Final Examination (UFE) serves this purpose in accounting.

What do you want to assess?

What you lot want to assess should be related to your learning outcomes for the form.

Knowledge or how it is used. You tin can design your exam questions to assess students' cognition or ability to apply material taught in class.
Process or product. You can test students' reasoning skills and evaluate the procedure by focusing the marks and other feedback on the process they follow to make it at a solution. Alternatively, you lot can evaluate the end product.
The communication of ideas. Yous can evaluate students' advice skills their ability to express themselves - whether this is by writing a cogent argument, or creating an elegant mathematical proof.
Convergent thinking or divergent thinking. You can examination your students' ability to draw a unmarried conclusion from unlike inputs (convergent thinking). Or y'all may alternatively want them to come upwards with different possible answers (divergent thinking). Do you expect different answers from students, or do you wait all of them to provide the aforementioned answer?
Accented or relative standards. Is student success defined by learning a gear up corporeality of material or demonstrating certain skills, or is student success measured by assessing the amount of progress the students make over the elapsing of the course?

How practise yous decide what to test and how to test it?

The overall examination should be consistent with your learning outcomes for the course. There are a number of ways to review and prioritize the skills and concepts taught in a course. You could:

Use the topics list provided in your grade outline
Skim through your lecture notes to find key concepts and methods
Review affiliate headings and subheadings in the assigned readings

What are the qualities of a good exam?

A good examination gives all students an equal opportunity to fully demonstrate their learning. With this in mind, you might reverberate on the nature and parameters of your exam. For example, could the exam exist administered every bit a accept-home exam? Two students might know the fabric equally well, but one of them might not perform well nether the pressure level of a timed or in-class testing situation. In such a instance, what is it that you really desire to assess: how well each student knows the material, or how well each performs under pressure? Likewise, information technology might be appropriate to allow students to bring retention aids to an exam. Again, what is information technology that you want to appraise: their power to memorize a formula or their power to use and apply a formula?
Consistency. If you give the same exam twice to the same students, they should go a similar grade each fourth dimension.
Validity. Make sure your questions address what you want to evaluate.
Realistic expectations. Your examination should comprise questions that match the average pupil'southward ability level. It should also be possible to respond to all questions in the time allowed. To check the exam, ask a teaching assistant to have the test – if they can't complete it in well under the fourth dimension permitted so the exam needs to be revised.
Uses multiple question types. Dissimilar students are better at different types of questions. In society to allow all students to demonstrate their abilities, exams should include a variety of types of questions. Read our Instruction Tip, Request Questions: vi Types.
Offer multiple means to obtain full marks. Exams tin can exist highly stressful and artificial ways to demonstrate cognition. In recognition of this, you may want to provide questions that allow multiple ways to obtain total marks. For example, ask students to list five of the seven benefits of multiple-choice questions.
Costless of bias. Your students will differ in many ways including language proficiency, socio-economic background, physical disabilities, etc. When constructing an test, you should keep student differences in mind to watch for means that the exams could create obstacles for some students. For example, the utilize of colloquial language could create difficulties for students whose first linguistic communication is not English language, and examples easily understood by North American students may exist inaccessible to international students.
Redeemable. An exam does not need to exist the sole opportunity to obtain marks. Assignments and midterms let students to practice answering your types of questions and arrange to your expectations.
Enervating. An examination that is too easy does not accurately mensurate students' agreement of the material.
Transparent marking criteria. Students should know what is expected of them. They should be able to identify the characteristics of a satisfactory answer and understand the relative importance of those characteristics. This can be achieved in many ways; you can provide feedback on assignments, describe your expectations in class, or post model solutions.
Timely. Spread exams out over the semester. Giving two exams one calendar week autonomously doesn't requite students adequate time to receive and answer to the feedback provided by the get-go exam. When possible, program the exams to fit logically within the period of the course cloth. Information technology might be helpful to place tests at the end of important learning units rather than simply give a midterm halfway through the semester.
Attainable. For students with disabilities, exams must exist acquiescent to adaptive technologies such as screen-readers or screen magnifiers. Exams that have visual content, such as charts, maps, and illustrations, may need to be rendered by Waterloo's AccessAbility Services into a format that meets an accommodation.

Later on the exam is ready

Fix a marking scheme or rubric

Preparing a marker scheme ahead of time volition allow y'all to review your questions, to verify that they are really testing the material y'all want to test, and to call back about possible culling answers that might come up.

Look at what others accept done. Chances are that you are non the only person who teaches this course. Expect at how others choose to assign grades.
Make a marking scheme usable by non-experts. Write a model answer and use this as the basis for a marker scheme usable past non-experts. This ensures that your educational activity assistants and your students can hands understand your marking scheme. It also allows you lot to accept an external examiner mark the response, if need be. A rubric tin be an effective tool to assist you or your teaching assistants appraise student work chop-chop and accurately. Sharing the rubric with your students as they begin to written report for the exam is also a good idea.
Requite consequential marks. Mostly, marking schemes should not penalize the same error repeatedly. If an error is made early but carried through the answer, you should but penalize it once if the residue of the response is audio.
Review the marking scheme later on the test. Once the exam has been written, read a few answers and review your central. You may sometimes find that students take interpreted your question in a way that is different from what you had intended. Students may come up with first-class answers that may be slightly outside of what was asked. Consider giving these students partial marks.
When marking, brand notes on exams. These notes should go far articulate why you lot gave a particular marking. If exams are returned to the students, your notes will help them sympathize their mistakes and correct them. They will also help yous should students want to review their exam long after it has been given, or if they appeal their grade.

Inform students of the purpose and parameters of the exam

Clearly communicate with students well-nigh what your goals are for whatever exam or exam. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the exam or test is. Have a discussion about your goals and desired outcomes, and help students understand how specific aspects of the test or exam fit these goals. Exist open to making some changes if students take ideas to offer.
Indicate out the important sections in class plans, textbooks, and readings to guide test and test preparation; where possible, provide multiple samples of tests and exam questions and answers. Consider conducting an examination review exercise.
Although you might not provide students with exam questions in advance, you should exist prepared to reply questions such as:
- What will the exam embrace?
- How much emphasis should I put on the textbook / lectures / etc…?
- What textile (if whatever) am I allowed to bring into the exam room?
- When will I become my marking?
- What happens if, for a good reason, I can't attend the test? Do I get to re-write?
- Volition I be given the take a chance to choose the topics on which I do questions?
- Volition I exist told which criteria I am being assessed on?
- If I disagree politically or philosophically with the marker, will I get poor marks?
- Will allowances be made if English is not my first language?

Later on your students write the exam

Monitor the quality of your exams

Exams provide you with the opportunity to obtain feedback on student learning, your educational activity methods, and the quality of the exam itself.

Write impressions on your test and keep them. During the test and the marking of the examination, keep track of which questions seem to be well understood, and which questions were oftentimes misunderstood.
Collect numerical data. If you take machine-scorable exams, you tin get statistics on your questions, such equally which questions were missed well-nigh frequently or which distracters were most often chosen. In other cases you can collect an overview of the marks.
Go student feedback. You lot can leave space specifically for feedback on exams, or you can obtain feedback in form after the exam. Consider asking your students to complete an exam wrapper – a short survey asking students about exam preparation strategies they used, what questions they found difficult to answer, and what they might practise differently to prepare for the next examination (see our Teaching Tip on Teaching Metacognitive Skills).

Reflect on the gathered information

Reviewing examination results can help you identify concepts and methods that students are having difficulty with – questions that were missed – likewise as concepts and methods that were well understood – questions generally successfully answered. Or it may highlight well-constructed or poorly synthetic exam question. Consider using this information to:

Change how you lot teach the remainder of the term
Bank check for improvement on specific topics or methods over a term
Redesign the course or the examination for future classes
Assess your teaching practice – what is working particularly well and what tin be improved upon

Resources

Brown, S., Race, P., & Smith, B. (1996). 500 tips on cess. London, United kingdom: Kogan Folio.
Brown, S., & Smith, B. (1997). Getting to grips with assessment. Birmingham, United kingdom: staff and Educational Development Clan.
McKeachie, W., & Svinicki, M. (2013).McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, enquiry, and theory for college and university teachers (14^th ed.). Belmont, USA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Worthen, B. R., Borg, W.R., & White, K. R. (1993).Measurement and evaluation in the schools. New York: Longman.

CTE teaching tips

Test Questions: Types, Characteristics, and Suggestions
Designing Multiple-Selection Questions
Aligning Outcomes, Assessments, and Instruction
Learner-Centered Assessment

This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our piece of work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Employ this commendation format:Preparing Tests and Exams. Centre for Educational activity Excellence, University of Waterloo .

cherryplicaut.blogspot.com

Source: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/developing-assignments/exams/exam-preparation