This will probably be the last post of my guest-stint here at Prawfsblawg, so it may be fitting to close with a post about final exams. Specifically, how early do prawfs start writing their exams? I’m sure this varies tremendously from those who reuse old multiple choice exams and hence have them ready from the start of the semester to those who procrastinate until just before the exam itself.
I like to finish writing my exam a couple of weeks before the end of the semester so that I have time to debug them, but that still leaves a lot of leeway in terms of when to start.
Posted by Tung Yin on November 20, 2006 at 06:23 PM
Comments
I tried this twice: handing out a portion of the final the first day of class. The portion I handed out was a policy question that asked students to synthesize the material. As is often the case, a handful of students got it, many had no clue. and for most it made little difference or was kind of a nuisance. I may try it again in the future, and I thought it was a helpful exercise.
Posted by: Shubha | Nov 24, 2006 2:22:00 PM
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I actually have rough drafts of exams done for both of my classes this semester. Of course, I’m a little neurotic when it comes to exam writing. But I also think that this is an area where there is a HUGE potential for professors to royally screw things up. There is the doomsday scenario where one drafts a question that contains a major error that renders the question almost worthless. There is also the problem of the woefully underinclusive exam that tests only a fraction of the subjects covered in a class and causes students to wonder aloud why they spent all that time in class learning about stuff that wasn’t tested. There are any number of other horror stories out there as well. I don’t think there is such a thing as the perfect exam. But I do think that writing a good one takes a fair amount of time and effort, so I’d err on the side of early preparation rather than waiting to the last minute.
Posted by: Alex Long | Nov 20, 2006 8:37:00 PM