Choose the right exam for your context
Use this resource to explore different types of exam questions to see which is appropriate for your course, decide on the exam conditions (e.g., in class, open book, use of tech, etc.) by following the guiding questions, and learn about two-stage exams, an example of collaborative learning in an exam setting.
How to choose the right exam for your context
Consider the learning outcomes you want to assess
As reviewed in our resource on planning assessments, you want to ensure that your assignments align with the course’s learning outcomes so that the tasks asked of your students match and measure the most essential knowledge, skills, and values you intend for them to develop. Instead of a go-to method to test students’ learning, an exam is one option among many types of assessments. An exam is appropriate when it is an effective way to assess the kind of learning you want to see in your students. Find what kinds of knowledge different types of exams test below.
Determine whether the assessment is formative or summative
In addition to aligning the learning outcomes to your exam, you also want to determine which assessments will be formative—students will have a chance to practice and receive feedback to improve on these—and which summative. Exams are a good example of summative assessments where students’ learning is measured at the end of a unit or course against a predetermined standard.
Keep your own context in mind
There are context-dependent reasons that can make an exam the best assessment choice. Two examples are:
- Very large enrollment courses
- Sections of a course with multiple instructors where knowledge checking and consistency in assessments are key
Decide on the type of exam questions and the exam conditions
Once you’ve decided to include an exam in your assessment plan and strategy, it’s time to determine what kind of exam. When choosing the right exam for your context, there are two important considerations: the type of exam questions and the exam conditions.
The reasoning behind choosing the right type of exam is the same as choosing the right assessment only instead of asking what assessment is right for gauging my students learning, you can ask yourself, what exam question will work best to text my students’ knowledge or skills? For example, a multiple-choice question is often a good choice if you expect your students to demonstrate their abilities to describe, identify, match or recall information, whereas an open book question can be a good option for students to demonstrate higher order thinking like analyzing, deducting or evaluating.
The second important consideration are the exam conditions. For example, will the exam be in class or done at home? Individually or in groups? Will be timed? Below you’ll find different considerations to keep in mind to help you choose best for your course and context.
Whether you choose in-class exams, low-stakes quizzes, multiple-choice exams, oral exams, take-home or open book exams and two-stage exams, you’ll first need to decide on the question type and the exam conditions.
Types of exam questions
Essay questions require students to provide longer, more detailed written responses to a complex prompt or question. They usually require the demonstration of analysis, critical thinking, and the development of coherent arguments. Exams with essay questions work well as summative assessments that test students’ learning of course content in both depth and breadth.
- Essay questions give students the opportunity to use course materials to demonstrate what they have learned in the module or class in more personal and creative ways.
- Responses can range from a couple of paragraphs to several pages in length.
- Writing the prompt can be done quite quickly but marking essay questions can be time consuming.
Tips:
- To allow your students to demonstrate the depth of their learning, give them a choice of more than one exam question to answer. i.e., “answer one of two or more questions.”
- If there are multiple markers, consider using a rubric so that there is a shared understanding of the assessment criteria and as a result more agreement among markers.
- Make your expectations clear by sharing the assessment criteria against which students’ answers will be marked.
- Be clear about how much time students have to respond (and if there is time allotted to both thinking and writing).
Often used to test student’s knowledge of a broad range of content, these kinds of questions are good for testing lower-level order thinking skills according to Bloom’s revised taxonomy. For example, to see if students can exhibit memory of previously learned materials by recalling facts, terms, basic concepts and answers or demonstrate understanding of facts and ideas by interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing and explaining main ideas.
- You can also use this kind of exam question to test higher order thinking skills, such as predicting or assessing. Learn how in this resource from McGill on writing effective multiple-choice questions.
- Students generally can respond to these types of questions quickly and they can be marked very quickly. Scoring can be automated for courses with large enrolments. Learn how to use quizzes on Moodle to do this.
- Creating these questions can be time consuming because you need to generate several plausible distractors in addition to the correct answer.
Tips:
- Create a bank of questions by drafting some questions each time you prepare or update a class or lecture.
- Heavily weighted, high-stakes multiple choice question exams, particularly when they are summative, or at the end of a course, may negatively impact student learning and well-being (French et al., 2024; Jones et al., 2021; Pascoe et al., 2020), so allow for practice opportunities through formative low-stakes quizzes, for example.
Learn more
This type of question can be drafted as short answer questions or run more conversationally with larger, more open-ended prompts like those used to craft essay questions. There has been a resurgence in the interest around oral or viva voce (live voice or in their own voice) exam questions with the advent of GenAI. They work well to test higher-order thinking, problem solving and students’ ability to think on their feet.
- Their highly personalized nature makes them good for in-depth questioning or testing students’ understanding in their own words.
- The time in preparing the questions is short, marking can be done in real time at the end of the exam if you use a rubric or a checklist, but you need to devote individual time to allow each student to answer the exam (usually 10-15 min per student).
- The interactive nature of this type of question helps students develop human-centred relational and communication skills.
- This type of question can be designed to reflect real-world interactions. Learn more about designing authentic assessments.
Tips:
- Students likely have little prior experience with these types of questions, so will benefit from having low (or no) stakes practice opportunities for both answering questions orally and in a way that is unscripted.
- When designing this type of question, be clear about whether it is a stand-alone question or if it is related to previous written work.
- Consider an alternative for students who may be unintentionally disadvantaged (e.g., students with hearing or speech impairments, social anxiety).
- Make sure your rubric or scoring guide can be filled in immediately and has different levels of success (as there likely won’t be clear right and wrong answers with this type of question).
Learn more
Students are asked to provide brief written responses to prompts or questions. These responses can be just a few words or a sentence or two in length. They can be designed as fill-in-the-blank questions. This is a good option for testing both lower and higher order thinking skills. For example, a fill-in-the-blank question might ask a student to recall a fact, term or concept, whereas a longer answer can be well suited to analysis or evaluation.
- As with essay questions, students can respond in more personal and creative ways than when they choose a predetermined answer.
- They are generally quicker to write than multiple-choice questions but marking takes longer.
- Students are less likely to guess which is the right answer when answering a short-answer questions as opposed to a multiple-choice question.
Adapted from Types of assignments and assessments, Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo
- Diagram or image-based questions: Students answer questions that require them to analyze or interpret charts, diagrams, graphs, or images.
- Matching questions: Students are asked to pair related items from two lists based on their associations. This type of question is good for assessing recognition and recall.
- Problem-solving questions: These questions present real-world or theoretical problems that require test-takers to apply their knowledge and skills to arrive at a solution. They are well suited for assessing process over or alongside product or outcome.
- Sequencing or order questions: These questions ask students to demonstrate their learning by arranging items or events in a particular order or sequence.
- True or false questions: Students are asked to determine whether a given statement is true or false based on what they’ve learned about the subject.
- Vignettes or case-based questions: Often used as part of an authentic assessment, these questions present students with a scenario or case study for which they must analyze the information to answer related questions.
Learn more
Exam conditions
Once you’ve determined what kind of exam questions will work best, you’ll need to decide on the conditions of the exam. While the most evident of these is in-class versus take-home exam, there are many other considerations that will help you determine which type of exam will work best for your context.
Review the options below and use the guiding questions to help you choose the exam conditions that will best allow your students to fulfill your expectations in demonstrating that they have met the learning outcomes.
| Options | Guiding questions to help you choose |
|---|---|
| individual or collaborative | Do students need to demonstrate their learning on their own or can they benefit from peer learning? |
| in class or at home (synchronous or asynchronous) | Will students complete the exam in class/synchronously to uphold academic integrity? Do students need more thinking time and can benefit from completing the exam outside of class? |
| proctored or not proctored | Will the proctoring conditions be consistent and fair? Are there other academic integrity issues that you need to consider that don’t have to do with proctoring? (e.g., access to the internet) |
| open or closed book | Do students need to be able to recall what they’ve learned or synthesize, curate, extract from course materials? |
| with or without technology | Will the learning outcomes be met if students use technology (GenAI or otherwise)? |
| timed or not timed | Could all students benefit from having twice as much time as needed? That could mean that no students would need to request accommodations for extended exam time. Learn more about inclusive pedagogy. |
| paper-based or online | Who may be unintentionally affected by having to write by hand? |
| written or oral responses | If students are asked to write, will they use only text or will they draw timelines, concept maps or images? |
Two-stage exams: Collaborative learning in an exam setting
In two-stage exams, individual students first take an exam or quiz and submit their work; every student then completes the same exam again, this time in a group of 3-5 students. Each group of students submits one answer sheet for the exam they have completed together. This method is an excellent way to engage students in peer learning as they discuss and debate their answers immediately after the exam.
In some variations, students work in groups first and then write the exam on their own. This method uses the strategy more as exam preparation and not exam review. In this podcast episode of Teach.Learn.Share you can hear four professors at McGill University speak to how they’ve adapted this exam method to their individual contexts.
Marks are distributed between the individual effort and the group effort. For example, if you run a midterm exam as a two-stage exam, you might allocate 20% of the course grade to the midterm which is calculated by allocating 85% to students’ individual grade and the remaining 15% based on the group effort.
The other steps described in this resource still apply, so you’ll need to determine the type(s) of exam question based on your learning outcomes and decide on the conditions. Once those are in place, you’d proceed with the two-stage exam.
Two-stage exams
- are well designed for large enrolment classes in which students don’t often have a chance to collaborate and learn from peers. Logistics can be tricky though, as not all spaces are conducive to many groups of students all talking at once
- can potentially reduce exam anxiety by lowering the stakes of the exam
- encourage students to recognize alternative perspectives or thinking processes and offer them the opportunity to practice both defending their positions and learning from others
- reinforce a collaborative approach to learning by offering students the opportunity to immediately discuss and debate processes alongside product or answers with their peers
Learn more
- See a list of instructors using this method across Canada as well as their resources on Saltise’s Two-stage assessment page.
- Find steps for implementing two-stage collaborative testing synchronously and asynchronously from Wilfrid Laurier University.
- Learn how to administer a two-stage exam in a remote environment from the University of Guelph.
Other considerations when planning an exam
Other aspects of exam planning to keep in mind beyond choosing the type of exam question and exam conditions include:
- Connecting the exam to the learning outcomes so students can better understand the role of the exam in the course’s design and alignment. An example of what this can look like is: “This exam assesses your ability to use … and to apply the principles … learned in this course to date.”
- Making your expectations around the exam conditions clear by sharing them in writing (on the syllabus and/or on Moodle) and verbally in class before students take the exam and in the exam instructions. Be as clear as possible, for example by explicitly stating whether students need to include their process in problem-solving or whether to use paragraphs or bullet points in writing.
- Wording questions clearly. It can be particularly helpful to ask a TA or a colleague to check your exam questions for clarity.
- Giving students twice the time you might expect for them to complete the exam so that no student needs to request a time-related accommodation. Students generally need three times the amount of time it would take you to complete the exam (Eberly Center, 2025).
- Determining in advance the point value of each question and how you will score each question. For example, will you give partial credit, or will you score an answer that assesses four principles on a 4-point scale? Making these decisions ahead of time can expedite the marking process.
- Having a back-up plan for the unexpected (to the degree possible), e.g., will you be able to move your exam online should in-person classes be suspended?
- Asking students to contribute to building a bank of exam questions by including active learning strategies like Invent the quiz. You can also develop exam questions based on queries you field from students. Using entrance or exit tickets is a good way to collect students’ questions (and gain some student feedback at the same time!).
References
French, S., Dickerson, A. & Mulder, R.A. (2024). A review of the benefits and drawbacks of high-stakes final examinations in higher education. Higher Education 88(3), 893–918. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01148-z
Jones, E., Priestley, M., Brewster, L., Wilbraham, S. J., Hughes, G., & Spanner, L. (2021). Student wellbeing and assessment in higher education: The balancing act. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(3), 438–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1782344
Parkes, J., & Zimmaro, D. (2016). Learning and assessing with multiple-choice questions in college classrooms. Routledge.
Pascoe, M. C., Hetrick, S. E., & Parker, A. G. (2020). The impact of stress on students in secondary school and higher education. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 104–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1596823
