An investigation of the issues involved in creating a bank of exam questions

Harriet Truscott

Past exam papers are widely recognised at Cambridge as a valuable resource for both students and supervisors, whether in preparing for exams or gaining ideas for supervision work. However, providing students with banks of past papers has proved to have major resource implications for the University, and particularly for librarians and administrators. Dr Keith Johnson, himself a lecturer, supervisor and Director of Studies, has proposed that an official bank of exam papers should be stored, and made available online. I propose to investigate the wider issues, both pedagogical and practical, around placing exam papers and questions online. As part of this investigation, I would expect to develop a prototype of a system for retrieving exam papers online, which would be informally trialled by students in Easter term 2010, and would then be developed further.

At present, in the University, past exam papers are presented in a wide variety of ways, from resources developed informally by individual staff members, to deliberate investigations of how best to present the materials for teaching and learning. The Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages appears to have done most work in this field, with two different student research projects displaying examples of how exam questions could best be displayed, in addition to the multimedia versions of 'past papers' they make available.

I propose to consider why people currently present exam questions as they do, and how students interpret them. Why does one lecturer provide exam questions together with comments? Why does another provide cribs or answers for his students? How does this help or hinder the students' learning? Is it more useful to present the students with individual questions, or with entire exam papers? Are exam papers enough on their own to provide a valuable learning resource for students? Should Examiners Responses be included? This area of research would involve a number of individual and group interviews with staff and students, together with an investigation of the current understanding of best practice. This research would then feed in to the prototype exam paper system.

Practical considerations are numerous: if past papers for a subject are held in a data bank accessible to students, what should happen when the format of a exam or course changes? How should the papers be stored in order to make them accessible to students with disabilities? Many exam papers include graphs and images, sometimes of very high quality (e.g. in History of Art), but will they also include multimedia such as audio recordings, video recordings? And how long will it be before papers on film do indeed begin to demand video within their assessment criteria?