Crowdsourcing exam questions
A more interesting alternative to outsourcing the production of exams is to crowdsource them. My wiki-based courses feature student-written exams:
I then give students a week to comb through their notes and their books to come up with passages for identification, short answer questions, and essay exams. The deal I always make is that if the students come up with an adequate number of smart questions, then I’ll draw the exam entirely (or close to it) from their questions, and will usually post it as a study guide a day or two in advance of the final.
What’s nice, and sometimes terrifying, about this approach is that the resulting questions usually do genuinely reflect the class’s work. That is, it quickly becomes clear what your students will be taking away from your class. Further, when the students collaborate in this way, they both have to do the reflective, synthesizing work of question-writing (which is better than cramming) and to come to an implicit agreement about what our course was about.
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