Math Exam Writing Workshop

The Math Exam Writing Workshop is a professional development opportunity for graduate students at UNL to learn about writing exams for both lower- and upper-level mathematics courses. While the exam workshop is being sponsored by the math department, graduate students from other departments are encouraged to attend, since math is often involved in many STEM problems and general exam writing guidelines can be applied to any course. Dr. Anthony Albano, an assistant professor in the Educational Psychology department at UNL, will speak about important practices to follow when writing exam questions, such as attending to issues of equity, accessibility, context, and validity. This will be followed by a structured activity during which graduate students will collaborate to rewrite example exam questions with the support of faculty and more experienced graduate students. A set of guidelines for best practices will be generated by the group for all participants to refer to in the future. In addition, we will host a moderated discussion with faculty and graduate students who have extensive experience writing exams for a variety of courses. Finally, participants will be given the opportunity to apply these practices by writing and revising exam questions for their own courses.