Metaquestioning

"I really want to argue something," says a voice from the back of the room. My students are in groups writing possible essay questions for an exam, each group choosing from a list of writing tasks (argue, compare, define, explain, and so on) and one group is arguing over whether their question should ask students to argue or discuss. It's a good question about questions--a meta-question! That's the kind of test preparation I like to see.

I've done this exercise before with mixed results: some students aim for questions they consider obvious or easy, like "compare text A with text B," but I tell them such vague questions generally produce superficial and unconvincing essays. I want them to design questions that will help them dig deeper into texts and show what they know, and so far, they're doing great.

I'm reminded of my Ph.D. comprehensive exams, when I had to submit my own questions to be mixed in with the other possible questions for each topic. I agonized over those questions, hoping they wouldn't appear lightweight next to the questions written by my committee, and I was delighted to see that they stood up to the test--and maybe that was part of the test. Writing good questions proved excellent preparation for writing the exams, and as a result, here I am, all these years later, asking my honors students to write their own test.

They wrote six questions and we looked at them as a class. I've promised to use one or two of them as the basis for their exam, tweaking the wording a bit to make them more clear or challenging, but I won't have to tweak much because they've written really good questions. 

"So does that mean we can skip the exam?"

Now it's time to argue.