Checking the exam questions

I seem not to have mentioned we have a new tradition in the School. Between uploading our exam papers onto a OneDrive folder, and letting the External Examiners loose on them, we go through them ourselves. We did that for the first time this academic year. Towards the end of the first semester, we got a lot of academic staff together, got split into groups, and then each took a selection of the exam papers under our wing. And the purpose was twofold: firstly, check if there was anything amiss with the questions. Were they clear? Were there accidentally any confusing typos left in them? If they had several sub-questions, was it indicated what proportion of the grade depended on which sub-question? Would someone with dyslexia struggle disproportionately with this question?

The second objective was to check for questions that would be too easy to answer correctly using AI. However; going through every single exam question in quite a number of exams is quite time-consuming. Pulling them all through AI was a bit much. But at least we could flag up questions of which we suspected it would be too easy to have AI answer them satisfactorily. 

It sounds like a very dull task, but actually, we ended up rather giggly. It can be quite funny to let your full language pedant loose on someone else's exam questions.

This year  we knew the drill. To my dismay, only five people showed up for the session, even though we have about 30 academic stuff! So we split into two groups, and set to work. And, surprise surprise; we got a bit giggly. I was quite enjoyable.

It is also just interesting to see what other people actually ask the students. There is such a range! Some questions go completely over your head if the topic is not your specialism. Questions about the details of certain geophysical pieces of equipment, for instance. If that's not your thing. I noticed my biological colleagues had no idea what I was talking about if I was asking questions about climatically significant geological events/periods back in time. They don't tend to think outside modern times! But some questions you can just do with a bit of common sense and some basic arithmetic.

I think the previous semester we ran heavily over time. This time, we were more of a well-oiled war machine, and we got all exams checked by the time we were supposed to be finished. All except one exam, that had not yet been uploaded. One of our staff members is a scoundrel!

I hope that now we have had a detailed look at all of them, the external examiners won't have that much to complain about anymore. We will soon find out! The exams are in May. And I think so far we seem to be skipping ahead of AI. But will have to keep an eye on the situation and not become complacent. I don't think any of us will be spectacularly increasing our level of skill, but AI is doing just that as we speak! But I'm sure we'll find a way to deal with that. At least for this academic year I think we're fine. And I'm quite happy with this new tradition…