49 Developing exam questions

What was your procedure for developing exam questions? What would you do differently?

EG: At the mid-October point I mentioned above, I started taking note of potential exam questions while developing my lectures. In retrospect I should have been doing this all along. I also asked my senior TA to brainstorm questions, and exchanged them with Emily to read over for clarity, to identify any ambiguous phrasing, and to confer about the appropriate number of points per question.

ES: I think that an ideal exam question is open-ended enough to allow for different responses from each student, but connected to the course content enough that you can predict what kinds of answers you will get. There weren’t many times when I was surprised by what a student wrote, and this helped me quickly work through grading final exams.