Final Exams Loom

I finally submitted the final exams to the office for storage. This time around, the administration wants the exams in at least a week before the date because the other times the other teachers only had it ready and photocopied the morning of the exam, which stressed out the admin that now they mandated their request.

Actually, producing the final exam is less stressful than writing one. On the other hand, it is much, much longer than writing one. But if one were to calculate the hours for a student to study, complete exercises, and revise notes on one course, it would probably add up to more, so I won't complain about the amount of time spent over one exam.

On the other hand, the responsibilities in exam making are staggering. Not only do I have to make up all the questions (I cheated, though, and took a lot of them from the damnable textbook), make full solutions of the questions, and mark them fairly, but I consider the following:

• Balance: on a scale of 1 to 10, difficulty should be a 5 or 6, depending on the type of course. The main issue is gaging the class' abilities and the difficulty scale.


• Weighting: more time spent on a certain topic doesn't necessarily correspond to more points in that topic. Hence, the points per question will vary.


• Type of questions: either make it easy on yourself to mark (but longer to prepare) and make those choice-based questions like Multiple Choice, True/False, etc. - or make it hard on yourself to mark (but shorter to prepare) and give open questions that will require pages and pages of student chicken scratch that you will have to decipher and make some sort of logical sense with, only to give half a mark for spelling a word correctly.


• Requirements of the course (and thus, the province): if there are 50 items in the course outline that must be covered, then the exam should cover as many as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to cover nearly half those points this term. :(


• Length: there's a danger that you want to cover everything in the course in the exam, in order to make all the study time worthwhile for the students. But doing so will make the exam much too long to be written in any alloted time slot. Otherwise, you'd have to ask pretty superficial questions just to get everything in. Last time, the exam was too long and I actually had to cut out two entire questions after the exam was written. :(:(


• Approval: who else but the administration will look at this exam? Actually, no one at this point. But if I had been in a larger school with more people having taught or teaching the same course, I would have to collaborate with that person to figure out what will work in the exam and what will be thrown out. Unfortunately, since I have never taught any of these courses before, it would have been better that I had someone else to consult with.

Now I can go to sleep.

P.S. School starts again on July 3rd.