Generating an exam with AI, and checking it properly

Generating exam questions is the single most useful thing AI does for a teacher, because writing questions is slow, repetitive, and easy to check. The saving is real. What makes it safe is knowing that generated papers fail in particular, predictable ways rather than randomly.

Ground it in your own material

A question generated from general knowledge of a subject is a question about that subject somewhere in the world. A question generated from the chapter you actually teach is about your syllabus, in your terminology, at your level. The difference is large in any curriculum and much larger in Arabic, where the same concept carries different accepted terms across textbooks. Always supply the source document.

Say what you want, in the terms that matter

"Make an exam on this chapter" produces twenty recall questions. The instructions worth giving are the ones a colleague would need: how many marks in total, the split across recall, application and analysis, which topics and in what proportion, the question formats, and the time the paper should take. A generated paper is only as balanced as the brief.

The four-minute review, in order

• Solve the questions you did not immediately verify. Wrong answer keys are the most common serious failure and the least visible: the key looks authoritative and nothing marks it as suspect.
• Check the distractors. Generated options tend to include one absurd choice and one accidentally defensible one. Both need rewriting.
• Cover the stem and read the options. The leak test from any well-written MCQ still applies, and generated questions fail it often: the correct option is regularly the longest and most qualified.
• Check the terminology against your textbook. The most frequent Arabic failure is a fluent, correct explanation using a term your students have never seen.
• Count the cognitive levels. Ask for 20% analysis and verify you got it. Generated papers drift toward recall regardless of the brief.

What generation does not give you

It does not know which questions your group will find hard, because it has never taught them. Difficulty comes from your records of what students actually got right. That is the argument for keeping those records, and the reason a generated paper is a starting point rather than an exam.

Sources

• OECD — Education and Skills
• UNESCO — Education