Skip to main content

Setting questions for essays and exams

Often, only on the first occasion when they mark exam scripts or essay questions do lecturers first become aware of just how sensitively the questions need to be designed, and how clearly the assessment criteria and marking schemes need to be laid out to anticipate as many as possible of the different ways that even the most unambiguous looking question can turn out to be answered in practice. The suggestions below are extracted from Race et al (2005) and may help to spare you from some of the headaches which can result from hastily written questions.

  1. Don't do it on your own! Make sure you get feedback on each of your questions from colleagues. They can spot whether your question is at the right level more easily than you can. Having someone else look at one's draft exam and/or essay questions is extremely useful. It is better still when all questions are discussed and moderated by teams of staff. Where possible, draft questions with your colleagues. This allows the team to pick the best questions from a range of possibilities, rather than use every idea each member has.
  2. Get one or two colleagues to do your questions - or do it yourself! Sometimes even sketch answers can be helpful. This may be asking a lot of busy colleagues, but the rewards can be significant. You will often find that they answered a particular question in a rather different way than you had in mind when you designed it. Being alerted in advance to the ways that different students might approach a question gives you the opportunity to accommodate alternative approaches in your marking scheme, or to adjust the wording of your question so that your intended or preferred approach is made clear to students.
  3. Have your intended learning outcomes in front of you as you draft your questions. It is all too easy to dream up interesting questions which turn out to be tangential to the learning outcomes. Furthermore, it is possible to write too many questions addressing particular learning outcomes, leaving other outcomes unrepresented in the exam or other assignments.
  4. Keep your sentences short. You're less likely to write something that can be interpreted in more than one way if you write plain English in short sentences. This also helps reduce any discrimination against those students whose second or third language is English.
  5. Work out what you're really testing. Is each question measuring decision-making, strategic planning, problem solving, data processing (and so on), or is it just too much dependent on memory? Most questions measure a number of things at the same time. Be up-front about all the things each question is likely to measure. In any case, external scrutiny of assessment may interrogate whether your questions (and your assessment criteria) link appropriately with the published learning outcomes for your programme or module.
  6. Don't measure the same things again and again. For example, it is all too easy in essay-type exam questions to repeatedly measure students' skills at writing good introductions, firm conclusions and well-structured arguments. Valuable as such skills are, we need to be measuring other important things too.
  7. Include data or information in questions to reduce the emphasis on memory. In some subjects, case-study information is a good way of doing this. Science exams often tend to be much better than other subjects in this respect, and it is appropriate to be testing what candidates can do with data rather than how well they remember facts and figures.
  8. Check the timing. You'll sometimes find that it takes you an hour to answer a question for which candidates have only half-an-hour. Assessors setting problem-type questions for students often forget that familiarity with the type of problem profoundly influences the time it takes to solve it. Students who get stuck on such a question may end up failing the exam more through time mismanagement than through lack of subject-related competence.
  9. Decide what the assessment criteria will be. Check that these criteria relate clearly to the syllabus objectives or the intended learning outcomes. Make it your business to ensure that students themselves are clear about these objectives or intended outcomes, and emphasise the links between these and assessment. When students are aware that the expressed learning outcomes are a template for the design of assessment tasks, it is possible for them to make their learning much more focused.
  10. Work out a tight marking scheme for yourself. Imagine that you are going to delegate the marking to a new colleague. Write it all down. You will find such schemes an invaluable aid to share with future classes of students, as well as colleagues actually co-marking with you, helping them to see how assessment works.
  11. Proof-read your questions carefully. Be aware of the danger of seeing what you meant, rather than what you actually wrote! Even if you're very busy when asked to check your questions, a little extra time spent editing your questions at this time may save you many hours sorting out how to handle matters arising from any ambiguities or errors which could have otherwise slipped through the proof-reading process.
  12. External review of questions. At most levels in higher education, exam questions are reviewed by the external examiner associated with your programme. You will need to check if this is relevant to you and what timescales are involved.