Many teachers may set “mock” exams for their pupils during this semester to get them prepared for the big exams at the end of the year. Here are some tips to help them prepare exam papers:

■ Don’t do it on your own! Make sure you get feedback on each of your questions from colleagues. They can spot whether your question is at the right level more easily than you. Having someone else look at one’s draft exam questions is extremely useful. This allows the team to pick the best questions from a range of possibilities, rather than use every idea each member has.

■ Ask colleagues: ‘what would you say this question really means?’. If they tell you anything you hadn’t thought of, you may need to adjust your wording a little.

■ Keep your sentences short. You’re less likely to write something that can be interpreted in more than one way if you write plain English in short sentences.

■ Work out what you’re really testing. Is it decision-making, strategic planning, problem solving, data processing (and so on), or is it too much dependent on memory? Most exam questions measure a number of things at the same time. Be up-front about all the things each question is likely to measure.

■ Don’t measure the same things again and again. For example, it is all too easy in essay-type exam questions to repeatedly measure students’ skills at writing good introductions, firm conclusions, and well-structured arguments. Valuable as such skills are, we need to be measuring other important things too.

■ Make the question layout easy to follow. A question with bullet points or separate parts can be much easier for (tense) candidates to interpret correctly than one which is just several lines of continuous prose.

■ Don’t overdo the standards. When you’re close to a subject, it’s possible that your questions get gradually harder year by year.

■ Write out an answer to your own question. This will be handy when you come to mark answers, but also you’ll sometimes find that it takes you an hour to answer a question for which candidates have only half-an-hour.

■ Try your questions out. Use coursework and student assignments to give components of your future exam questions pilot runs, and use or adapt the ones that work best for exams.