Tests and quizzes are great for making sure students have read and for assessing their comprehension. Across my classes, I’ve done plenty of formative assessments, but for my American Seminar class specifically, I needed to mix in a summative assessment to see how much the students had actually retained from reading and discussion and to see what parts of the book I needed to discuss.
For my summative assessment, I focused on their most current reading assignment, chapters 6-12. I gave a Mid-Book Quiz, which was taken from an outside source. To make the quiz my own, however, I created my own answer sheets and short answer/essay question.
There were two answer sheets. One answer sheet had a question about the scaffolding scenes in chapters 1 and 12, asking students to compare them. The other answer sheet asked about Dimmesdale’s midnight vigil and which ways time had passed and changed the characters surrounding the vigil.
I gave the students in class on the quiz day the first question. Anyone that needed to take the test later had the second essay question, that way it allowed for less of an advantage to those students.
I also graded the exam in two parts. The multiple choice section was out of 35 points; the short answer/essay was out of 10 points. This gave the students two separate assessment scores in the grade book.
Here are the document versions of the answer keys: Key 1, Key 2