Creating a quizz
You want your quiz to assess learning outcomes for your course. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but being aware of why we are testing students and what exactly we want to test can help make students’ and instructors’ experience of quizzes more useful.
A good exam gives all students an equal opportunity to fully demonstrate their learning. Think about multiple question types and about who might take the course: students will differ in many ways including language proficiency, socio-economic background, physical disabilities, etc.
A great way to foster good results is also to be clear about the purpose and goals of the quiz: having a paragraph on what the quiz aims to measure is reassuring to everybody and sets the table for grading.
Grading quizzes
You want your grading to be equitable and not take too much of your time.
A way to achieve both of these goals is to first read all of the quizzes, skimming them, to determine a general level of performance. It is then easier to go through it again with more detail, without singling out any very good or very bad quizzes.
For equitable grading, short of preserving the anonymity of your respondent, you might want to use this method:
1- Grade answer #1 on every test
2- Change the order of respondents
3- Grade answer #2 on every test
4- repeat step 2 and 3 for all the questions
This method avoids the bias of expectation order AND the potential “frustration after three bad answers”.
Don’t forget to change settings if you feel uncomfortable, it might have a threatening effect on your grading and your back!