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Designing Exam Assessments

Let's think about where you are and how far you've come. You're thinking about making the switch to mastery grading (or you're actually making the switch!). You've written your objectives, considered your grading scheme, converted your assignments and projects, and you're really excited. This is going to be the best term ever!

You're merrily walking along, when it hits you. You've forgotten about exams. How does mastery grading work with exams?! This is like that recurring nightmare -- you know, the one where you walk into your classroom and you suddenly realize that you've forgotten to write and print copies of the exam you said you'd give today. All your students are sitting there with their sharpened pencils and you're just standing there empty-handed. Your palms are getting sweaty, your eyes are wide, and your blood pressure is rising.

You don't have that nightmare? Oh, it must just be us...

Anyway, don't panic. We've got you. Let's talk about exams and mastery grading.

Exams in a Mastery Grading Context​

Exams in a mastery grading context are much like exams in a traditional grading context. They still have a variety of questions and question types. They still take place at a certain place and time. They still can be "open book," "closed book," or allow "cheat sheets." They still give students an opportunity to showcase skills at levels of Bloom's Taxonomy that aren't otherwise covered by homework, projects, etc. To state it simply, the exam papers themselves can be identical.

The differences lie in how you assess student responses.

Mastery-graded exams are assessed on objectives.​

Much like with projects and homework assignments, you'll select some subset of the course objectives (usually between 2 and 8) to assess on the exam.

Let's say your exam covers 6 of your course objectives. When you used traditional grading, this exam had 13 questions. That's totally fine. Maybe questions 1, 2, 4, and 7 all relate to Objective A. Maybe questions 2, 5, and 6 relate to Objective B. Great. When you're writing the exam, just list the relevant objectives for each question where you used to write the number of points (e.g., "Question 2: (16 points)" becomes "Question 2: (Objective A, Objective B)"). No other changes are necessary.

When you get the exam papers back from the students, it's feedback time. As you read through student assessments, focus on giving them feedback about how to improve. With each feedback message, include the objective to which your comment relates. For example, if your objective is "Fractional Arithmetic", you might write, "Fractional Arithmetic: Remember that fractions should always be reduced to make your answers easy to read."

After providing the relevant feedback for a student's entire exam paper, you'll choose which mastery level is most appropriate for the work.

tip

When we assess exams, we preface our feedback with a descriptor for better clarity. The three descriptors we use are: "Major mastery-related concern," "Minor mastery-related concern," or "Note." This would extend the previous example to: "Fractional Arithmetic: Minor mastery-related concern: Remember that fractions should always be reduced to make your answers easy to read."

This can get wordy, but it really helps students understand how much weight (if any) that a given bit of feedback carries in your assessment of their mastery. Students love it (well, as much as they can love anything about exam assessment). In fact, we started adding these descriptors after our students explicitly asked us to.

The descriptors also help us as we choose the appropriate mastery level for the student's work. We can say to ourselves, "Okay, this student had two major concerns and three minor concerns for this objective. That's probably a "Not Yet." The ability to quantify feedback just a little helps the mastery levels feel less arbitrary and helps our assessments stay consistent across students.

Students get more than one chance.​

In order to stay true to the value of growth mindset, students in mastery-graded courses should be able to improve their exam scores after they deepen their learning. We're not suggesting an unlimited number of retakes, because, seriously, who has time for that?

Here's what we do. Let's say our course has three exams.

  1. On the day of the first exam, students take the first exam. (Go figure!)
  2. On the day of the second exam, students take the second exam and can choose to retake any questions from the first exam.
  3. On the day of the third exam, students take the third exam and can choose to retake any questions from the second exam.
  4. For the "final exam," there are no compulsory questions. Students can choose to retake any questions from any of the other three exams.1

This means that students can attempt any given exam question at most three times (only twice for the last exam). Note that we don't use the exact same question three times -- instead, we have three variations of the same kind of question (similar level of difficulty, similar skills required, similar pitfalls possible).

This retake policy can sound daunting at first, we know. When we switched to mastery grading for the first time, we expected that we'd have to do three times as much grading as we did before. In practice, though, allowing retakes really isn't that much more work for us. In our courses, for each exam, about three quarters of students choose to retake at least one question but only one or two students wants to retake more than half of the questions. So, roughly, we need to assess about 25% more student work per exam than we would if we didn't allow retakes.

Also consider that a students response on a retake exam will most likely display improved learning. The assessment of retake exams is quicker and easier because there's less constructive feedback to give. Yes, you'll be assessing roughly 25% more work, but you're only spending about 10-15% more time.

As we write this, we can picture that condescending colleague in front of us, saying, "I DON'T HAVE 15% MORE TIME!" While we don't appreciate his tone, his point is valid. Time is precious and we'd all rather spend it doing anything other than grading. If the retake system that works for us doesn't work for you, that's okay. Maybe you can allow retakes only at the end of the term1, or maybe you lessen the impact that exams have on the overall grade. Maybe you decide that exams serve little pedagogical purpose and you eliminate them all together. We all need to find the policies that are right for us and, most importantly, the policies that are right for our population of students.

Looking Forward​

In the next section, we'll dive into participation assignments. Should you include them? Should you not? Let's talk about it. Together!

Footnotes​

  1. Students really appreciate the notion that they can retake any exam question at the end of the term. It gives them peace of mind throughout the term and it keeps the stress level down. In our experience, though, only about 1 in 4 students (if that) actually takes us up on the final retake offer. In fact, one term, exactly zero (of 40) students showed up for the final exam period. You'll likely spend more time writing the retake exams than you do assessing them. ↩ ↩2