As an English teacher, I typically used class discussions, projects, and essays as my summative assessments. I rarely gave a traditional test with multiple choice, true/false, or fill-in-the-blank questions. And for the regular school year, that worked just fine.
But what about those big semester or final exams?
Rather than suddenly give an assessment that was nothing like anything the students had seen all year in my classroom, I created what I call “Alternative Exams” that require more critical thinking and application AND that I could grade quickly to have those grades done and check out for the year!
Exam 1: Essay Revision & Reflection
This “exam” requires quite a bit of work ahead of time for the teacher, but less after the exam period than having students write a full exam essay.
Here’s how this one works:
- Before Exam
- Students write & submit an essay
- Teacher reads the essays and leaves feedback to guide student revision
- During Exam
- Teacher returns the essays with feedback
- Students revise their essays and complete a writing reflection on the revision process
- After Exam
- Teacher grades student writing reflections
- Teacher compares student original to revision
This exam activity forces critical thinking and metacognition for the students. And for YOU, the teacher, you don’t have to spend a ton of time rereading the essays — you can just look at the revisions and reflections!
I have a done-for-you resource here that walks students through the reflection process.
Exam 2: In-Exam Group Project & Presentation
This one is my favorite because all the work happens during the exam period — including the grading!
This particular one is from my American Literature class, but it would be easy to customize it for your class.
Here’s the basics of how it works, and it all takes place DURING the exam period:
- Student groups (created by you or them) work together to create some sort of final product that shows their understanding of the connections between the literature you’ve read this year.
- Students may also be required to demonstrate understanding of vocabulary words and/or grammatical concepts from the year.
- In the last 15-20 minutes of the exam period, student groups present what they have created.
- Teacher provides the texts for students to use and refer to as they work.
- Teacher moves around the room to provide support and answer questions (and to make sure all students are engaged and working together).
- Teacher grades the work WHILE students are presenting!
Sometimes you have to go back and review the presentations to double check grammar and vocab, but most of the grading is done before students even leave the room!
I love this option because it hits on SO MANY standards and skills: collaboration, reading literature, reading informational texts, finding connections & theme, speaking and listening, writing… It’s all there!
To make it work for your class, you could require that students include information about how they divided up the work, that they cite their sources in proper MLA format, that they include video or audio or particular tech tools, anything you want. It’s fully customizable.
It may seem like a tall task for students, but I had a class full of students with learning struggles who really loved the creativity this allowed them and did some truly amazing things in only an hour.
Final Thoughts
I’d love to hear how you have chosen to change up your assessments from mutliple choice to something different!
I love giving students opportunites to have choice and voice in my classroom and to take ownership of their learning, and I hope this gave you some ideas for creating more authentic final assessments for your classes, too.
KatieMacTeach 