How so, you ask? After all, the students are taking the exam. You're writing them, deciding what they need to know. (Feel the power!) It's all a little more complicated than that.
The first stress is finding the time to write the exam. Many textbook publishers will give faculty exams that they can either give as is or adapt to their needs. These are called test banks. I've never been a fan of them. For one thing, my lecturing and discussion style inevitably leads us far afield of the text (not off topic, mind you — let's just say that I try to add value to the textbook presentation). The other thing is that I'm pretty sure that textbook publishers don't know the first thing about writing exams.
For me, much of this weekend's been taking up with writing and editing exams. My final exams are multiple-choice affairs, with much of the previous assessment of the course based on students' writing and critical-thinking activities in the course. And I cranked out 3 exams of 50 questions each yesterday. It took about 8 hours of my day, which was OK, given the crappy weather here in Iowa.
The second stress is editing the exam. To make for as fair an exam as possible, I start with an exam from an earlier semester and go over every question carefully (inevitably finding editing errors from the previous semester — ugh!). I never teach a course in an identical manner two semesters in a row, so that means a lot of questions from the old exam get thrown out and thus must be replaced with new questions. Those usually aren't too hard to write; I never seem to lack for material.
But then there's the detailed line-by-line editing. I teach copy editing at Simpson, so I'm a bit of a stickler for this. You're looking for the obvious typos, bad punctuation, etc., but you're also reading for clarity and the existence of (in my mind, at least) one clear answer to each item. There's nothing that bugs a faculty member more than a student claim that a question was a "trick" question — not because we want students to sit down, shut up and take the exam, but more because we feel that we've failed them in giving them a fair assessment of their knowledge. So I go over each question carefully, changing the order of questions if needed, making sure references to other questions in the exam are accurate, taking extra care to make sure there aren't two or more correct answers to an item.
How long does this all take? For each exam, it's 3-4 hours of work that goes through three or more drafts of an exam before a final copy is printed out.
In other words, anyone who says that faculty give multiple-choice exams because they're lazy and just want the semester over typically have never written one themselves.
Oh yeah, there's also 10 internship portfolios to grade this week, along with 20 papers from my Liberal Arts Seminar class. So it's going to be a busy and stressful week.
But I'll make it.
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