Here are some examples of tests, but please send us materials that you think would be helpful to your colleagues.

 

• Using examples and short quotations from the text.  Submitted by John Immerwahr, Villanova University.

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• Mindful Reading Assignments.  Michael Strawser (University of Central Florida) has developed an approach for assessing student comprehension of material by asking them to choose and reflect on passages from their assigned texts (as a sort of take-home exam). His article beings with an interesting philosophical discussion of assessment in general, but then gives practical examples in the second half of the article.  

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• Explain a passage/identify the author of a passage. One approach is to take a passage from the assigned material and ask students to explain it to you, put the argument contained in the passage in premise-conclusion form, or explain an objection to the argument in the passage discussed in class, or explain how another author would respond to the passage. As an undergraduate, I had a professor who simply had a list of twenty single sentences and students had to identify which author of the authors over the course of that unit wrote or said the sentence. This was a challenging exam style for students who weren't doing assigned readings! 

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• Rehearsal tests. David Waller, of California State University-Fullerton, was struck by how different the art classes he was taking as a student were from his own philosophy classes, specifically how much he and his fellow art students learned from seeing each other's work.  In order to help students write better exams, he has them do a "rehearsal exam" and then puts some of the questions up anonymously and lets students critique them.  It is also possible to do this with papers as well. "Pedagogical Pilgrim: what the Arts Taught me about Philosophy." Teaching Philosophy. 28.4 (2005): 343-350. I find rehearsal, or ungraded "diagnostic exams" to be very helpful in logic classes, as it helps students to realize whether they really can, say, evaluate an argument using a Venn diagram or perform a proof before they take the graded exam; it also gives you, the instructor, an idea of how prepared students are for your exam. I took this idea from the late Professor Randall Dipert, a professor of logic at the University at Buffalo.

 

Update:  October 11, 2015 (E. Tarver); 12/9/2025--David Sackris