The style of my exam questions

As an unhealthy tradition, students like to memorise formula, facts and solutions of past year questions when they go into the exam halls. How would you make them not to do so in your paper? First, you don’t’ recycle your past year questions. Second, design questions that genuinely test the level of their understanding. To put this into practice, in most of my final exam questions for the first year students, I would include a multiple choice question section, which contained between 20 – 40 questions. It is comprised of non-calculative questions that can be answered without a calculator, designed with the intention to test the level of understanding on the theoretical aspects of certain specific physics concepts. This section is “notorious” among the students because one will have very little chance to pick the correct option without having any in-depth knowledge and logical thinking of the particular concept being tested. In addition, these questions were never recycled, hence you can’t answer the questions correctly by only memorising the past year questions. All of the answers and occasionally the full solution to these multiple choice questions would also be uploaded online. On top of these, the solution scheme may also indicate the source where these questions were adapted or inspired. A large percentage of these objective questions were original. After a few years of teaching Modern Physics ZCT 104 for example, a large body of objectives questions have been accumulated. Students were advised to go through them as an effective way to deepen their understanding on a particular topic. The solutions were themselves valuable examples to illustrate the application of the physics concepts taught in the course. When I designed these exam questions I bear in mind that these question sets would be made as a source of knowledge for the students in the future. Understandable, preparing these multiple-choice questions demands quite a bit of thinking effort. To make matter worse, these questions were also required to be translated into Bahasa Malaysia, which often meant another whole-day work for me.