We know that students have to spend time preparing for and revising for exams for GCSEs and A Levels, but, how do we ensure that our internal assessments are fit for purpose?
I have been teaching for 30 years and have lost count of the number of different exam papers that I have set, tweaked and then modified again for students. Learning how to set a good examination paper that challenges all the different elements of a course can be challenging and you always feel that you have to reflect and change things further. I don’t think I have ever used the same paper twice – I will always be changing something to respond to marks, student comments etc.
Recently, I was putting together a list of questions that Head of Departments could use to reflect on the assessments they were using for Christmas exams this week. Here is the list of twelve reflective questions that I came up with:
- How appropriate were your exam papers for the different year groups? Did students have too much time left at the end/ too little time? Do you need to ask more questions or cut the length of the paper down?
- Were students answering every question or were there some questions that were being left out consistently?
- Did your paper reflect the Scheme of Work that teachers had been following?
- Had the teachers in your department covered all of the material required for the examination?
- Was there enough ‘differentiation by question’ within your exam paper – i.e. did you have a good range of easy questions and then harder questions to challenge the different areas of knowledge, understanding and skills within your curriculum?
- Did you have an agreed mark scheme that was used by all teachers in your department?
- Did you carry out a standardisation activity within your department to ensure that teachers were marking in alignment and not too harshly or too easily? How confident are you that an 80% in one class equals an 80% in another class?
- Were the marks awarded for the papers within an acceptable range? Was there a step in the average class marks from one banded class to the next (for Junior classes in particular)?
- Do you have too many people scoring less that 40% or more than 90% in your paper?
- Is there evidence that students have or have not revised for your examination? What steps were put in place to encourage students to revise for the exam in your subject?
- Have you an agreed method of feeding back marks and following up exam papers within your department?
- Are students expected to do corrections from exam papers? How do you ensure that they are not embedding the wrong answers into their memory?
So let me maybe add a little more detail behind each of these
- How appropriate were your exam papers for the different year groups? Did students have too much time left at the end/ too little time? Do you need to ask more questions or cut the length of the paper down?
Timing an exam paper is not an easy thing to do. Students will all work at different speeds. It is good to ask the students if they had too much time left or were too tight to the wire. The best way to test this is for you and maybe a colleague to see how ling it takes you to answer the questions. Obviously, it will take you less time that a typical pupil but if you find that it takes you 45 minutes to write answers for a 1 hour paper – that might be tight for a less expert student. Sometimes, it is good practice to have a longer question as the last question that gives students more time and space to write a longer answer and this can absorb time if the exam paper is shorter.
2. Were students answering every question or were there some questions that were being left out consistently?
We should be looking to find out if students could answer the questions. Have they studied everything on the exam paper? Has a teacher left out a topic or an explanation? Are there areas where students should have had more notes or knowledge to ensure that they were prepared for the questions? Look for a pattern – maybe this was a more difficult question or maybe the way the question was asked made it difficult for the pupils to work out how to answer.
3. Did your paper reflect the Scheme of Work that teachers had been following?
Was everyone in your department aware of what was going to be on the paper exactly? Some HoDs don’t like to share the actual paper so that teachers cannot ‘teach to the test’ and it gives a real sent of ‘proper assessment’ like GCSE exams where the actual questions are totally unseen. The key measure though, is making sure that your examination paper is in alignment with the official Scheme of work. There will always be more learning done through a curriculum than there is space for on an exam paper – but, a good paper will have enough coverage of the majority of the learned information.
4. Had the teachers in your department covered all of the material required for the examination?
Staff absences and sometimes just the way the timetable falls – might have an impact on the amount of progress that a class is having through a curriculum. It is important that HoDs take a constant stock of where each class is and edit an exam paper accordingly. However, you also need to check that teachers have also put the emphasis on the right things and in the right places. Sometimes one teacher spend too long on one topic to the detriment of another topic and HoDs should check that their colleagues have the balance right.
5. Was there enough ‘differentiation by question’ within your exam paper – i.e. did you have a good range of easy questions and then harder questions to challenge the different areas of knowledge, understanding and skills within your curriculum?
Getting the balance right in any exam paper can take a lot of work. Every exam paper should contain a range of questions that will test different aspects of the course. Teachers should ensure that there is a balance of knowledge questions (that show revision/ knowledge of the subject), understanding questions (that allow students to demonstrate their application of the learned information) and skills questions (that might be subject specific skills such as French vocabulary, using Algebra, balancing scientific equations, or using OS 6 fig Grid References). Teachers should be mindful of the level of difficultly for questioning (see Bloom’s taxonomy). Usually, skills questions are the most straightforward and simple skills questions can provide a nice start to any topic on an exam paper. Knowledge questions can be straightforward one-word answers or can require more detailed expositions of information. Often, understanding questions are those that demand explanations, comparisons and evaluation and can be the most difficult for students to handle. It is good practice to try and level up questions gradually on an examination paper (or within a topic).
6. Did you have an agreed mark scheme that was used by all teachers in your department?
An essential element to ensure consistency within any department is to ensure that an agreed mark scheme is used to mark every single exam. The mark schemes should be tested to ensure they cover every possible answer – though teachers are also advised to still use their professional judgement for answers that do not fit precisely with the mark scheme.
7. Did you carry out a standardisation activity within your department to ensure that teachers were marking in alignment and not too harshly or too easily? How confident are you that an 80% in one class equals an 80% in another class?
The second way to ensure a consistency in the standard of marking within a department is for the HoD to carry out some level of standardisation/ moderation of marking within the department. There are many different ways that this can be carried out but usually this is done best as a shared activity where 3 papers from a class (top/middle/bottom) are shared with colleagues for second marking. If a HoD finds that a colleague is marking too easily/ harshly, then further action might be needed to modify the marking of that set/teacher or perhaps the marks might be standardised in a way to reflect the marking tendency.
It is important that within a subject area – that the mark that a student gains for the same paper is consistent. You want to be sure that a mark of 80% in one class is the same as what a student with a similar performance would have achieved. You don’t really want to have one teacher marking to easily (so the mark should have been 72%) or too harshly (so the mark should have been 86%).
8. Were the marks awarded for the papers within an acceptable range? Was there a step in the average class marks from one banded class to the next (for Junior classes in particular)?
When designing an exam paper, it is important to have a range of questions that allow students of all abilities to get marks. However, it is also equally important that the very best candidates are challenged and stretched so that there is a differentiation of marks based on the quality of answers. In my school, I encourage KS3 departments to gradually ramp up the difficulty of their papers so that by the end of Year 10 – the questions and papers should directly be comparable to what students will have to answer as part of their GCSE subjects.
If classes are streamed or banded there should be a noticeable step in the class average from one class to the next. Yes – classes are usually streamed on their English and Maths scores which means that you will get outliers who are good at certain other subjects but usually, within a school, the class averages should remain consistent.
9. Do you have too many people scoring less that 40% or more than 90% in your paper?
There will always be students who do no revision/ exam preparation and whose score is poor – but how poor do you allow it to be? Do you include activities that allow even the most allergic to revision to score marks with closed question activities and sorting activities that might give some confidence in their learning.
Equally, how many of your students are getting excessively high exam scores. How many people do you want achieving 90%, 95% and 99%. Getting marks in the 90s should be the gold standard, it should only be the most brilliant students who have dazzled the marker with the most amazing answers. We prepare students for a fall if we give them easy papers with too high a class average. We should see a broad range of marks within our subjects. Maybe from 40 (at the bottom) to 95 at the top. If you have a paper with too many students getting above 90% your paper is too easy / the questions are not challenging enough/ you are marking the answers too easily.
10. Is there evidence that students have or have not revised for your examination? What steps were put in place to encourage students to revise for the exam in your subject?
How do we know how much revision and preparation for an exam a student has done? Yes – we might ask them but sometimes it is also about quality of revision as opposed to quantity. How much time and effort did you spend in class sowing the seed in relation to revision and making it a priority? I don’t mean how much time did you spend in class doing revision – as revision is something that we need to be encouraging students to do mostly, at home. As teachers we need to be constantly echoing the mantra of revision – that all learning is cumulative, that what we learn today prepares us for tomorrow.
Class teachers need to take responsibility for ensuring that their students are actively engaged in revision . . . think about how you can encourage this more!
11. Have you an agreed method of feeding back marks and following up exam papers within your department?
So, the papers are complete and marked. How do you use this opportunity to engage with the learners, give them feedback and check that their understanding going forward is the right answer as opposed to continuing to dwell on the wrong answer. In my classes I always use a reflection sheet with students first to find out what they thought of the paper/ how much revision they have carried out etc. On the other side of that page is a space for them to write down their marks for questions and to reflect on how they answered the questions from the exam paper. I have a system for feedback. I go through all the marks and give individual comments to the students (and yes- I expect them to write this down). We then start to look through and review the papers. I write lots on an exam paper. I annotate heavily. On the front of our internal exam papers – there is a space for a comment – this can be for student or teacher comment – I usually insist on both – they get a comment from me and I want them to respond/ write up their own. Feedback is a continuous conversation – it starts with the exam papers and can end up in written report comments or conversations with parents at parental consultations but feedback never ends.
12. Are students expected to do corrections from exam papers? How do you ensure that they are not embedding the wrong answers into their memory?
As mentioned above, we need to be ensuring that we are not continuing to embed or reinforcing the wrong answers with our students. They need to be corrected and they need to then have time and space to practice this correction and make sure that this becomes the embedded knowledge (replacing the wrong answer). This means that we need to be getting students to follow up on their exam papers. Whether this is a simple writing out of corrections (in class or as a homework) or through an additional low stakes re-test that follows up the places where mistakes where made.
Exams and assessments are not just stand alone – do once and forget. They are an important and integral part of the learning journey and teachers need to learn how to ensure that they are used effectively to improve students.
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