General Tips For Preparing a Test

      

    When a person is scared, angry or is experiencing any strong emotion, language will instinctively revert to what is most natural for that person. Do what you can to relieve as much of your students’ stress as possible by writing good test questions so that you are testing their knowledge at its best, not its worst. Here, some of the general tips for preparing a test. 

1. From easier to harder questions: Start your test with the easiest questions and move toward those that are more difficult. That’s because if students start with difficult ones, this will strike them and they won’t have the ability to concentrate. So, going from easier to harder questions alleviates stress for your students and makes for a better testing experience.

 2. Test multiple learning levels: Make sure to target multi learning levels in your test. The majority of your questions should target the lower learning levels of recall, comprehension and application, and the higher levels of learning like analysis, synthesis and evaluation. That’s to give chance for the students who are not able to analyze to at least reach the passing grade. 

3.  Practice: You should train the students to practice the quiz/test with similar structure, so you can test the content and not the form. 

4. Structure and content: The structure must be very well organized and it is not accepted to give a student an exam that is not organized. It does not hurt you as a teacher or skew your test results to give your students a heads up about the type of questions that will be on the test. Also, give them some idea what content will be covered on the test though you do not have to give specifics. 

5.  Include the points each section is worth: This way students can budget their time to be most impactful for them. Let them have full knowledge of what is weightiest as they take the test so they can prioritize as they take it. So, make sure to include the points that students will get on each section. That’s really important because if they are struggling in a question, they know for example that the question doesn’t have lots of points, so they can move on. 

6.  Classify the questions according to what skills they require of the students: information recall, translation, interpretation, application of principles, analysis of concepts, synthesis of ideas, or evaluation. 

7. Ensure the validity in the test: In order to be valid, to answer the question, it should cover what you discussed in class and it should be aligned with the learning outcomes of the course.

 8. Item Analysis: The way of the items should be appropriate, they should be related to the learning outcome, relevant to what discussed in class and they should be very clear. 

9. The table of specification (TOS): Helps the teachers to align the assessment with the course learning outcomes. It helps a lot to decide on the content of the exam regarding levels. This strategy can be used for a variety of assessment methods but is most commonly associated with constructing traditional summative tests. The TOS will assist teachers in mapping the amount of class time spent on each course learning outcome to the cognitive level at which each learning outcome was taught thereby helping teachers to identify the types of items they need to include on their tests.