Examinations are the crucial point of every teacher and student alike. This is the pivotal moment that we will see if your students learned something in a quarter, semester, or entire year.
A standardized examination is already the trend but in some cases or schools, teachers create exams. Its mechanics and creation are highly base on factual concepts. Contrary to students think that the exam is made to torture them. In my experience making exams can be a challenge, balancing out the contents using H.O.T.S (Higher Order Thinking Skills) and L.O.T.S (Lower Order Thinking Skills) is important, considering the scope and sequence of the lessons, desired outcomes, and grading methods is a lot. Many factors go into exam-making.
Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only. The contents of these blogs are based on my personal experience and research. Please do not come for me.
For our new teachers, here are some details you might want to check before making an exam.
As much as possible create an exam based on objectives. Exams are evaluated based on many aspects and one of this crucial setup is ensuring that your exam is based on lessons you have taught to your students. Checking your lesson plan's objective, curriculum guides, and scope and sequence are important. Let us looks at your students' perspective and how do you think they will answer the exam.
2. Valid
A well-written exam is considered valid if it is measured. Interpretation of the exam results entails the use of the exam. The result will be considered the evidence of the students learning, and at this point, as teachers, we will be able to know and analyze the quality and quantity of our teaching process.
3. Reliable
An exam should hold a consistent measurement of scope and evaluation to validate its use and the data you would like to extract. An exam should be a balance of true scores and observe score variables. In this aspect we could determine the following:
- Is the exam needed to administer again?
- Is the particular score can be interpreted?
- Are errors present in the exam?
4. Authentic
Depending on the given situation it is vital as educators to introduce authentic exams such as (essays, interviews, portfolios, performance tasks, and more). We can literary measure the students' holistic learning in this aspect, which is not enough with our traditional pen-and-paper exam. The result that we can get from pen-and-paper sometimes is inadequate to measure students' overall learning; as much as possible our exam should have an authenticity to measure the intangible learning curves of our students.
5. Clear & Comprehensive
Creating an exam has its complexity; as much as possible we want our exam to be easy and somehow difficult for our students to encourage learning development and brain activity. Writing clear and comprehensively is important; being straightforward is one thing but being grammatically correct, and understandable are keys to a good exam. We need to place ourselves in the perspective of students to point details of clarity, confusion, comprehension, and correlation.
6. Balanced
As much as teachers want to make it easy for students, it is very important to practice balance in terms of exam creation. Balance in terms of exams number of items, types of exam instructions, and measuring the exam. Redundancy, authenticity, and alignment should be considered in our day-to-day interaction with our students, it should give us an idea of what standard learning measures do work for our students.
7. Practical & Economical
In the education industry, examination making is brutal. As teachers, we need to practice our resourcefulness for we should focus on exerting our effort and time of exam creation that will achieve our goals. Whether it is a Standardized or Personalized exam we need to outline the specifics of its financial, and timetable implications. No teachers or students want to deal with an exam that makes them feel it is impossible to answer or measure.
At the end of the day, no exam in pen-and-paper can ultimately measure students learning. The only thing we can provide as teachers to our students is that their scores will validate their existence as human beings. The exam results are only guides that in some areas they are lacking, and need to focus on turning their weakness into their strengths to use in real-life situations.
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