With finals right around the corner I am thinking about exams now more than ever. In my years at UW-Green Bay I have never thought about how much effort goes into writing an exam. Personally I had just thought that Professors got their exams from the books or some other place. I don’t know why but I did not think they wrote the questions themselves.
Being a TA has opened my eyes into how much time some professors take to write an exam. It must be stressful to try to come up with over 45 to 60 questions especially if you want to write a good question. Reading the teaching book I got it says there are some things one should not do when writing questions. One of the biggest things that I have grown to have a disliking for is when professors put all of the above or none of the above in their choices. The book says this is something that should be avoided. Unfortunately I do not think some of my professors got that memo! I am sure that on at least one of my exams there will be those type of questions along with some other poorly written ones.
With that said I must say the exam question I wrote did not go over well at all so I can give my professors a little lead way. I thought that I had a great exam question but not even half of the students were able to correctly answer the question. I would like to say it was due to the fact that it was a harder question and not poorly written but I am not quite sure of that. When writing the question I was confident that most people if they read the book and took notes on the lecture would be able to answer this question.
If I was a professor and saw that my question did rather bad I would have to swallow my pride and probably throw it out. Admitting that one of my questions was poor is a rather difficult task as I would like to blame other factors. I wonder if this is how professors feel about their questions?