How to set question papers for Terminal Examinations
This article gives a brief description of how the teachers should set question papers for primary classes, i.e. Standards I to V in schools.
Need for guidelines for primary classes teachers to set question papers.
The teachers teaching primary classes in lakhs of schools in India need some guidelines to set question papers for their students for their quarterly, half-yearly and annual examinations. This is because the question papers at high school level are mostly set by various boards / universities and distributed to the schools. But such a facility does not exist for students at primary school level. Teachers at primary level has to be resourceful.
It is commonly observed that a teacher joining a school has to use her own initiative to set the question papers. As such, it is important for a teacher at primary school to be very resourceful and creative. Most of the newly appointed teachers start depending on the questions already set by their predecessors in the previous years or they take the help of the questions given under a particular lesson in their students' text books. The teachers must understand that their job is not like a clerk's job in the office who follow the rule of 'turn and learn'. Here are some guidelines for the teachers to set questions for examinations:
1. Take help from the question papers set earlier by their predecessors, but don't merely copy them. Use your own imagination, knowledge, technique to add / replace the content.
2. While taking help from text book questions given under a particular lesson, take an utmost care to see that the question should not just be copied in the same format as given under the lesson. This is so because the questions given under the lesson, pertain only to that particular lesson, and may contain nouns / pronouns / adjectives as subject of the questions. Let us take an example a lesson "Save Our Trees" in an English reader of Class 2, in which some students on their way to school see some men carrying axes in their hands.
The teachers may find a question " What were the men carrying?" in the Exercise section after this particular lesson. This question if given in a terminal examination in the same format will be meaningless, since this is meant for comprehension of the students after the teaching of a particular lesson. The best way to give some questions in lower classes is to give a few lines of the text from the reader and then give a question relevant to that text.
3. Divide your questions in the 'essay type' and 'objective' type format. Give more weightage of marks to objective type in the lower classes say classes I to III. The essay type will have questions based on the text in the reader. The objectives may include question headings like "Fill in the blanks", "Choose / Tick the correct answer", "Write True or False", "Write Yes or No"., "Matching", "Circling the letters / words / numbers", etc. It is better to include more of images in the lower classes.
4. Read the question paper at least once to make any revisions / corrections in spelling and grammar etc. before submitting it for typing.
5. Make a justifiable distribution of marks depending on the effort the child has to make in answering the question.
6. It is advisable to get your question paper checked by some one else before submission for typing.