Creating Class Tests

Before the Test

• Needless to say, preparing your students for exams is part of your job. However, don’t forget that teaching to the test is rarely the best choice. Learning is not about better grades, it’s about getting better!
• In the course of the unit, practise all kinds of exercises that you want to use in your exam.
• A mock exam can help your students to evaluate what kind of challenge is waiting for them.
• You might also assign specific exercises as homework or as training materials in free learning periods.
• Especially for younger and inexperienced students, hand out a complete learning schedule with task descriptions and subject matter at least seven days prior to the test – which is also when you should announce it!
• If your students are between 10 and 12 years old, test duration should not exceed 45 min. From an age of 13 to 16, an hour will do. In their junior and senior year, exam times can be increased to 90 minutes.
• As a rule of thumb, place your class test in the last third of the unit.
• Usually, it does not make much sense to fix all class tests at the beginning of the year. Timetables are subject to various changes all throughout the year.
• Make sure your students’ desks are arranged in a way that makes it difficult for them to cheat!
• Everything your students do not really need should be stored in their schoolbags!
• To facilitate corrections, it is highly recommendable to create a table of expectations with all possible solutions.
• Think of worthwhile activities for students that hand in their exam papers prior to the official deadline (“early finishers”).
• Your test must meet certain scientific standards – the results must be valid, objective, and reliable.
• Describe and, if necessary, provide all the extra materials (e. g. dictionaries) that students should use during the exam.
• Consider that your students might be allowed to use extra materials only for parts of the exam – you should be able to collect these materials or the respective exam sheets.

Test Design

• Whenever you recycle old testing materials, make sure the date and group identification have been changed;
• It can be dangerous to re-use the previous year’s test formats; many kids have older friends or siblings that may endow them with correct solutions!
• Students should leave their names on each page of each sheet!
• There should also be enough space for your signature; depending on which age group you have to do with, you should also leave some space for parents’ signatures as well.
• Start with the easiest tasks, then proceed to the more difficult ones!
• Make sure that the exam tasks are varied enough so that your students find something suitable for their particular talents! Offer a combination of open, half-closed and closed formats, for pronunciation, listening, reading, writing, and mediation.
• A good exam layout combines exercises for specific language components with tasks for skills plus holistic tests for real world tasks; there should be discrete point testing, but also pragmatic testing and communicative testing.
• To discourage cheating, you might offer A and B versions of your test!
• The weighting of each task should be known to all your students beforehand! For every task, write down how much credits a students can get!
• Don’t forget to wish your students good luck and add a nice cartoon to the test sheet!
• You might print time limits right next to the task descriptions so that students have an idea of how long every exercise should take!
• Task descriptions should be clear to everyone in the room!
• Give the overall number of credits!
• Leave a blank for your students’ individual GPAs and the overall class average of the whole group!

During the Test

• Bring some fresh flowers or a candle or anything that creates a peaceful and fear-free atmosphere.
• Sweets can serve as time markers – pass them round to indicate it’s about half-time.
• Teach your students methods of relaxation, do some yoga with them or have them meditate a bit. Breathing techniques or physical exercise can also help to reduce the stress level.
• Most students find it helpful if their teachers talk through the test before they can go to work.
• If your students are free to ask questions, limit the number of questions every individual can ask. It is also possible to ban questions in the first ten minutes!
• Avoid time pressure. Don’t inform your students every five minutes how much time is still left. Nonetheless, a timeline on the blackboard can help your students to keep track of the available time.
• If you notice that student copy from their classmates, mark their sheets on your seating plan. Avoid personal accusations during the exam but be clear about the consequences of cheating.

Corrections and Feedback

• Some teachers prefer correcting exam tasks separately, exercise by exercise, one by one, rather than completing each of their students’ papers; adapt your exam layout to your correcting habits.
• Avoid ranking your students with regard to their performance – and never reveal anyone’s results in a public space or whenever their classmates are present.
• As your testing system usually focusses on norm referencing and criterion referencing, don’t forget to give your students feedback on the base of self-referencing.
• Tests should be handed back as quickly as possible – but don’t let your students exert any pressure on you!
• Parents will surely appreciate some kind of personal feedback from the teacher – give them some hints how they can support their child.
• There is a number of ways how you can present your students with the correct solutions (you might use a projector or give them a printed version of your table of expectations).
• Also, your students should recognize their mistakes and learn from them; you might collect their most outstanding blunders on a “blunder sheet”);
• If your students have done fairly well in the exam, there is absolutely no point in changing the class average to make the result look more “realistic”.
• If there is no fixed colour code for corrections, create one! Avoid an overdose of bright red!
• Also, your students’ grades don’t have to follow the infamous Gaussian curve.
• Verbal comments are appreciated by most of your students; offer praise and consolation likewise.
• Grading exam papers according to the ratio of mistakes per number of words seems rather fair; however, impression marking schemes are often more accurate in describing what the individual student can actually do.
• The distribution of grades is an important tool to visualize your students’ performance; however, informing everyone about exact numbers might lead to teasing or bullying.
• When you return the test, tell your students a) to have a short look at it, b) not to cheer or lose their temper, c) not to compare their results with anyone, d) to tuck it into their school back to take it home.
• Avoid common judgement biases that usually occur in corrections.
• Use a system with credits rather than a system based on mistakes; give positive feedback and focus on chances for development.
• Don’t just highlight or underline whatever mistake you detect, but also offer corrections and make recommendations what your students can do to improve!
• It is also useful for everyone involved to add the in-class performance of the individual students to the exam grade!