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| How to Prepare a Test |  1. Developing a test
Usually most classroom tests are developed for the certain purpose, like:
- establishing a basis for assigning grades
- determining the level of student’s achievements of course objectives
- understanding student’s problems for remediation
- determining if there is a need to improve instructions.
If you want to develop a good test, at first you have to determine a purpose and then write appropriate test items to achieve that purpose.
2. Pitfalls during test developing
The most often pitfall is that the purpose you hit may not be the purpose which you have set in the beginning. In other words, the test results may not measure what you want them to. For example, if test questions require students to reflect the textbook material, without applying their practical knowledge or to solve problems, than the test results won’t be valid.
3. How to obtain a valid test scores?
Check the instructional objectives and the test items – they should be appropriate. For example, if your instructional objective is supposed that students should apply principles to new situations. Then your test items should correspond to your objectives by offering opportunities for students to exhibit that behavior. There is an easy method for planning a test by creating a table with the tasks across the top and the course content along the side. Each call in the table matches to a particular task and subject content. It is easy to determine how much emphasis to give each task and each content area is specifying the number of the test items you want for each cell. Remember, that sample items should represent the whole variety of testing areas.
4. General guideline for writing a test
- Do not present inconsiderable or esoteric ideas in the test questions. Present single significant, clearly defined problems.
- Find out what difficulty level you need for proper students’ knowledge evaluation and try to follow it.
- Use simple, clear and unequivocal wording.
- Avoid using irrelevant or extraneous information.
- Abstain from providing needless hints at the correct answer. Most students know that right answers are sometimes longer, more general or more specific than others; include familiar phraseology, one of the two similar statements or one of the two opposite statements and so on.
- Avoid cultural, racial and sexual bias. Items should not be bases on presumed knowledge that favors one group over another.
- Use answers from opened-ended questions given in previous exams to provide realistic distracters.
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