Getting students to write the exam
If a class requires a content-based exam, it can be quite useful to have students write different question types for an upcoming exam and provide the answers to the questions they create.
Reasons
When students write exam questions, the side effects are extremely beneficial. First, they need to read the material, think about the content, then create the questions required and provide complete answers. As they will need to read carefully, students will practise and will soon improve their intensive reading skills.
In addition, if the assignment to create questions specifies a limit to the number of questions to each page, section or chapter, students are subsequently encouraged to read more of the required material ahead of the exam. This is beneficial as it allows them the opportunity to return to class knowing which areas they do not understand or need further explanation on.
Second, as they need to write questions and provide answers, both writing and question-asking skills will be practised, hopefully leading to an improvement in both skills.
Finally, as students must provide answers and a marking scheme, they come to understand how exams are written, how they can best prepare for exams and finally, how they can best answer exam questions.
Question types
There are five basic question types used in most exams: 1) true/false 2) multiple choice 3) matching 4) short essay and 5) fill in the blank.
Each question format requires a different type of preparation. True/false questions involve reading material and determining which areas are potentially most confusing. In addition, students also need to change the content or ideas to produce a number of false answers.
Multiple-choice questions not only require students to under-stand the question and know the correct answer, they need to be able to understand associated concepts well enough to create alternatives that will appear to be rea-sonable choices to other students. In addition, as all four choices must be equal or nearly equal in length and structure, ample practice in working with parallel style is needed.
For matching questions, finding the vocabulary and matching definitions will encourage students to review material by looking for clues of words and definitions that the author has included in the material. These include the use of bold print, parentheses, brackets, the verb to be, relative clauses, and hyphens.
In short essays, students need to provide answers and a scoring guide, leading to a need to examine quite closely the sufficient areas of the material to create the number of required questions and answers.
Finally, fill in the blank, based on either content or grammar points studied, provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate, through their selection of blanks, what they find or believe their fellow students will find most difficult, and perhaps lead to areas to review further in class.
Concerns
Teachers who have not tried this idea might suggest students will trade questions among themselves. They might, but if a class is large enough and students do not duplicate assignments, ques-tion variety can be quite exten-sive.
If 20 students write five questions from each of the five areas and even if only 50 percent are original, that produces 250 questions for the students to evaluate. Ironi-cally, the questions produced by students are often much more difficult than the questions that most teachers would create.
Asking them to write questions based on the content studied not only creates a useful pool of questions, but also offers a valuable insight into areas where they are experiencing difficulty, evidenced by their reluctance to produce questions from a particular theme or by the mistakes in the questions they produce.
