Exams should be production-based which essentially means no multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, or T/F. This is somewhat flexible for low levels like 1 & 2. The goal is to see if students have sufficient language skills to express and support their own opinions, correctly use vocabulary in their own sentences, explain inferences, write their own implied main ideas, correctly use grammar forms in context, express themselves orally, listen and apply information,...... Basically, they produce almost everything.
Production-based assessments are more demanding, but they give the teacher a much more accurate idea of what the student knows and what their true skills are. It eliminates that uncertainty as to whether the student is guessing at an answer, or even was misled by the possible answer choices. In addition, it cuts down on cheating. It's easier for dishonest students to memorize a set of multiple-choice or T/F answers than to try to remember sentence-length and longer responses or attempt to copy these off their neighbor during the exam.
I know that most reading & grammar textbooks come with exams that are not production based, probably because such questions are easier to grade (the publisher just provides an answer key) and they don't require subjective evaluation. Production-based assessments require more work to produce and evaluate, but they give you a clearer picture of students skills. Making & grading production-based assessments is challenging at first, but in the long run it will make creating new exams or modifying existing ones easier. Making your own exams also gives you more control and allows you to tailor them to exactly fit the format you used in class assignments. It can also make it easier to give partial credit for answers. In the end, production-based assessments will give you a clearer sense of your students abilities while building your own assessment skills at the same time.
Suggestion:
If you would like to see examples of production-based assessments for each skill/class, check out the
sample diagnostics (and finals) in the shared folder or on the new-teacher site.
