2 Ways I Would Have Made Your Life Easier Last Week

YOU GUYS, I finally figured out how to make semester exam and study guide creation 43% less time-consuming and 29% less stressful. And it only took me [redacted] years to figure it out!

Note: Our exams count for 10% of the semester grade. In other words, it is very difficult to change your letter grade by your performance on them. In other other words, the kids have figured out they don’t mean anything and don’t take them very seriously. Therefore, I refuse to spend any more time or effort than absolutely necessary. So here’s what I did:

1) Because I sort of did my own stuff with Algebra II this year (more on that when I have more time), I had to throw out a lot of questions and put some new ones in. But, ugh, writing multiple choice questions, amirite?  But then, *light bulb* I realized I could use questions from old tests and use actual student-generated wrong answers for the distracters. I keep all their old tests, so it took just a few minutes to go through, pick out some good questions, and then look at their work to find “good” wrong answers.

2) Ugh, (mandatory) exam study guides, amirite? And then I’m not sure what is worse: making the key or making 27 corrections to the key. Well, hey, guess what? I already have some great (corrected!) study guides for each test; I’ll just pull my questions from those. But here’s where the genius part comes in (seriously, I had one class applaud me for my brilliance. Are you ready for it?): Copy and paste the title of the study guide and leave the numbering the same as the original study guide. 

For example, here’s how the start of Alg II one looked:

Alg II SG Example

The cleverness lies in the fact that I’ve already posted all the keys and video keys online, so students could just consult those if they were stuck. No new key to make! Or video key!  Woot woot!

And yes, sorry for delaying in sharing this awesomeness with you until the middle of exam week.  But store it in the back of your brain for May and thank me then.

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3 comments on “2 Ways I Would Have Made Your Life Easier Last Week

  1. Meg, how did you make the graphs for 17 and 18?

    • I didn’t make those (stole them from a worksheet) but I would recommend graphfree.com to make something similar!

  2. […] so I blogged this in late December, but you may have slept since then and therefore forgotten these 2 ways to make creating exams […]

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