Advantages of Tests:

• Motivation.  Tests motivate students to study the material.

• Assessment.  Tests provide a way for instructors to measure student learning.

• Retention.  The act of studying for a test helps students retain and understand the material.  Suppose, for example, the student reads Plato's Apology in September; by December, now that the student is reading Sartre, the Apology is a distant memory.  Studying for the final exam creates an environment where the student must think about Plato and Sartre together. The act of revisiting the earlier material also helps the student retain the information. Some instructors disdain tests and rely solely on papers because tests primarily focus on lower level thinking. TΦ101 does not agree, arguing the act of studying for a test, regardless of how valid the test is, is a positive learning experience for students. Further, tests can be devised that require higher level thinking, and in the age of large language models, the in person paper and pencil test is making a significant comeback. When students know they ultimately have a test on material, I find that they are more likely to keep up with the course material as the semester progresses. 

 

Types of Test:

• Short-answer, objective questions.  These may be short definitions, identifications, or multiple-choice. They are easy to grade and can be used to cover a lot of content, but focus primarily on memorization and can lend themselves to cheating (Clegg and Cashin). 

• Essay tests.  These can and should focus on higher order skills, but take more time to grade, can only focus on a limited amount of content, and are also subject to inconsistencies (even the same grader will give different grades to the same essay at a later point) (Cashin).

• Combinations. Many people combine short-answer and essay questions, and as you will see from the examples, there are dozens of different ways to test.    

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Helping Students to Study: 

Students often complain that they "don't know how to study for a philosophy test."  TΦ101 believes that it is very important to give students some direction in how to study for the test. One strategy, adopted by many teachers, is to select the final test questions from a much longer list, which is distributed to students in advance.  So for example, the study guide might be long enough to include questions on virtually everything that the instructor wants the students to know or to think about.  Students will study for the test by preparing answers to the study questions.  This form of testing has a number of advantages, one of which is that it is very easy to develop make-up tests, merely by selecting a different batch of questions. Often students will prepare by working in groups; although, in general, students learn more by working in groups, this can provide an opportunity for some students to be "free riders" and take advantage of the hard work of others.

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At the very least you want to provide students with some kind of study implement or guide, at least for the first exam. I find it helpful to have students to help construct the study guide--what do they expect me to ask them about? Alternatively, I construct the study guide and then ask some students to submit questions about the study guide, and then set other students on the task of answering those questions; that is, indicating in what course materials students might find the answer. 

 

Final Exams:

Final examinations, of whatever style, deserve special consideration. TΦ101 favors cumulative final examinations, without which students may not have a chance to review all of the material covered in a semester in order to make connections.  TΦ101 objects to the practice of excusing students who are doing well from taking the final. This seems extremely unfair to weaker students; if anything students who expect a high grade should be expected to do more work than weaker students, not less.  Final exams are not a good place to experiment with new types of questions. Psychologist John Ory has an excellent discussion of exam strategies. A final exam, cumulative or non-cumulative, is a good to have on your syllabus to keep students motivated through the end of the semester. 

 

Sources:   

Boyle, Allison P. "Writing better essay exams." IDEA Paper no. 76, March 2019. 

Davis, Barbara Goss. "Quizzes, Tests, Examinations."  University of California Berkeley 15 July 2012

Improving your test questions. Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, University of Illinois.

Ory, John C. "The Final Exam." Association for Psychological Science Observer, 16:10, October 2003.

Weir, Rob. "Having the Final Say." Inside Higher Ed. 7 December 2009.

 

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