Building a question bank you will actually reuse

Every experienced tutor has hundreds of good questions. Almost none of them can be found. They are in last year's papers, in a folder on a laptop, in a notebook, in photographs of a whiteboard. So every exam season starts by writing questions that already exist somewhere.

The problem is metadata, not storage

Storing questions is trivial. What makes a bank usable is knowing, without opening anything, which questions cover which topic at which difficulty. A folder of PDFs named "term 2 exam final v3" is storage with no metadata, and it is functionally the same as having nothing.

Five fields per question, and no more

• Topic, from a fixed list you write once. Free-typed topics drift ("quadratics", "quadratic eq.", "2nd degree") and drift makes the bank unsearchable.
• Grade or level.
• Difficulty, but see below, because this field is usually wrong.
• Cognitive demand: recall, apply, or analyse. Three values, not six. This is what stops a paper being twenty recall questions with a hard-looking cover.
• Where it has been used: which group, which term. So you do not hand the same class the same question twice and read it as improvement.

Five fields can be filled in fifteen seconds. Twelve fields cannot, and a bank people stop populating is a bank that stops being complete enough to trust.

Difficulty is measured, not declared

The difficulty you assign when writing a question is a guess, and it is usually a guess about length rather than difficulty. The real value is the percentage of students who got it right last time. After one use you can replace your guess with a number, and that number is what makes a balanced paper possible.

Build it from marking, not in a sitting

Nobody successfully sets aside a weekend to build a question bank. What works is adding each question as you write it for a real exam, with its five fields, and recording the success rate when you mark it. Two terms of that and you have something no amount of weekend effort would have produced.

Sources

• OECD — Education and Skills
• What Works Clearinghouse — Educator Practice Guides (US Dept. of Education)