An examination is a timed assessment format that occurs in a supervised environment. Exams occur in controlled conditions and are mainly used at the end of the term of study or the academic year. Exams are often closed-book, meaning that students do not have access during the exam to any additional materials or resources. In an open-book exam, staff decide what materials students can bring into the exam (such as formulae and data sets, their own notes, a dictionary, the course guide or specific textbooks).
Exams can include long and short answer formats, multiple choice questions and problem sets, and test students’ capacity to recall key relevant information and conduct analysis under pressure.
Typed exams can help students to articulate more clearly, and markers to read more easily. Markers can also then work on exam scripts simultaneously. Contact Eden Digital Education for more information: eden.digital@lse.ac.uk.
- The exam format is often familiar to students.
- The controlled environment limits the possibility of academic misconduct.
- Exams can test for a wide range of course material in a single assessment, and encourage students to revise a wide range of course information rather than cherry-pick topics.
- Despite their artificiality, exams can develop transferrable and employability skills in students (Stankov, 2024).
- Can be stressful, particularly if more than one exam is scheduled over a short period.
- Stressful environments lead to students producing conservative answers and playing safe in their responses, rather than formulating critical insights.
- Exams can encourage students to focus on memorisation, which in turn encourages surface rather than deep learning. Open-book exams may allow more focus on understanding and analysis, but introduce other challenges including synthesizing information and managing time (Al Fraidan and Alsubaie, 2025).
The validity of exams can be enhanced through good design, where questions test for higher order thinking skills such as application, analysis and synthesis, rather than memorisation.
Exam questions can be shared with academic peers to check their clarity. Some departments request exam questions to be approved by the department, and by the external examiner.
This assessment might disadvantage some students, particularly through its time limits and constraints. This includes students with specific learning difficulties and students with English as an additional language. Consider how the assessment could be planned to minimise this disadvantage, including using criteria which reward higher order thinking (following the learning outcomes).
Exams may be difficult for disabled students. For most, the existing ‘My Adjustments’ process will be sufficient adjustment. The School recognises however, that for a small number of students, an alternative assessment should be considered.
Writing new questions annually prevents students from obtaining unfair assistance from either past papers or students in previous cohorts, while allowing past papers to be used as a revision resource.
Al Fraidan, A., & Alsubaie, M. S. A. (2025). Exam Anxiety and Vocabulary Challenges: Insights from Postgraduate Female Students in Open and Closed Book Exams. Educational Process: International Journal, 14, e2025026. https://doi.org/10.22521/edupij.2025.14.26
Stankov, P. (2024). Are exams authentic assessment? The case of economics. Practical Assessment, Research, & Evaluation, 29(3). Available online: https://doi.org/10.7275/pare.1984