Shake up Your Exam Routine! Student-Centered Exam Enhancements

Exams are traditionally seen as high-stakes summative assessments designed to measure content mastery. But, with some creative tweaks, traditional exams can do double (or triple!) duty by engaging students in deeper metacognitive thinking about their discipline and their own learning. Here are some easy add-ons you might consider in order to shake up your exam routine:

Invite students into the exam prompt design process

As any professor knows, writing great exam questions is not as easy as it seems. It requires content expertise but also creative imagination, communication skills, a granular understanding of the cognitive sub-skills required for task completion, and a good sense of the learners’ ability level. You can help students understand the conceptual complexity of exam design by “lifting the veil” and showing your class how experts go about developing exam prompts. Better yet, you can invite students to try their own hand at designing exam questions for your course (Ahn and Class 2011 [PDF]; Green 1997 [PDF]; Maddox 1990; Corrigan and Craciun 2013). Prompt design makes a great low-stakes homework assignment, but it can also serve as the centerpiece of an in-class review session, where students draft, analyze, and refine prompts together—or even compete to create the best prompt. (The promise of using winning prompts on the exam itself can provide an authentic incentive!) By gaining a better understanding of what makes a successful exam prompt, students come to understand the cognitive “moves” they are expected to master; this expanded understanding helps them prepare for the assessment and, perhaps more importantly, gives them a better sense of disciplinary norms that too often remain implied or altogether hidden from academic novices.

Invite students to reflect on their exam answers

Reflection is a fundamental part of the learning process—yet most of us rarely make time for reflective practices or assignments that communicate this import to our students. An exam provides a good opportunity to sneak in moments of reflection through follow-up questions that ask test-takers to assess their responses and assess their preparation process in light of their responses. Or, if time is tight, students can simply rate their responses on a simple scale from “I’m confident the answer I gave is correct” to “I’m not sure if my answer is correct” to “I’m pretty sure I got this answer wrong” (chemistry professor Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh streamlines this process with the use of emojis). Building a reflective component into your exam invites students to think about what they’ve learned but also about how they learn—and provides you with valuable insight into what’s going on beneath the surface of exam responses. Exam reflections can also serve as a starting point for follow-up feedback and exam wrappers. Finally, building in a reflective component, however large or small, reinforces the important message that a test is not a final step in a linear learning experience, but, rather, one point in an ongoing cycle of learning.

Invite students to show off what they learned

While exam questions are designed to assess specific aspects of student learning, consider adding an extra question that allows students to show off learning not captured by your prompts. This can be an optional extra credit section or a part of the exam itself. Here’s a sample prompt: “Use this space to show me something important you have learned in this course that you didn’t yet have a chance to demonstrate on this exam.” This easy add-on allows students to demonstrate knowledge on their own terms, communicates your interest in student learning, and personalizes the exam experience. Your students might surprise you!

Last but not least: put them at ease!

Exams are a notoriously stressful undertaking. Some level of stress can be mobilizing, but we can (unless one of our learning goals is the ability to perform under pressure) take a few small steps to make the exam-taking experience less nerve-wracking. Consider tweaking the tone of your prompts to add some human warmth or adding a few non-content items like a welcome message, a mid-exam message, or relevant test-taking tips. You can also help lower anxiety levels by opening the exam session with an image designed to put test-takers at ease (perhaps a calming landscape or a photo of yourself as a college student?) or by reiterating your faith in your students’ ability. These seemingly trivial adjustments can make a big difference in the exam experience!