If you do not have the luxury of using a language program that has standardized exam for students, then you have to take the time to write your own.  Or you might be in a situation where you have a standardized exam, but you need to add a customized component to it.  Whatever the case, you should follow a methodology when approaching this task.  There should be a lot of thought behind it in order to be effective and truly measure what students have learned from the class.

Begin with the end in mind.  How much time will students have to complete the exam?  As you write the exam, how much time do you think students will take on each section so that you plan according to your time constraints?  Also, factor in time to review the exam if that will happen during the same class.  Will you include speaking, listening, reading, writing, and grammar on the assessment?  If the course uses an integrated skills approach, I recommend that you assess all of the skills listed above.  What about culture?  If this was a primary learning outcome, then it should also be included on the exam.

Start out with a planning checklist.  Write down all of the language functions, vocabulary, and grammar topics covered in the class.  As you create the exercises, check off the items as you have included them on the exam.  This way you will be sure not to miss any major topics.  You will have to decide which topics you want to cover for each of the skills, and you should have overlap where you assess a language function in multiple skills.

First, create your oral assessment.  List a combination of questions or situations that students must respond to in the target language.  Score students based on their 1) comprehension of the question or situation; 2) appropriateness of the answer; 3) grammatical accuracy of the response; and 4) fluency of the response (no pauses or hesitations).  What we do for our assessments is get students working on the reading and writing sections, and then the instructor brings each student outside of the classroom to conduct the oral assessment.  The instructor uses a score form and scores the student as they go along.

Next, create your activities for the listening section.  This can be done with your reading aloud or by playing an audio or video file.  There are many different ways you can assess this skill, so it will depend upon how much content is in the audio or video and what the level is of your students.  Be careful when you ask students to listen and write simultaneously; i.e., listen and write the words.  You have to be sure that students have sufficient time in between each word before writing the next one.  I recommend that you play the recording three times.  The first time have students listen only or mark what they can.  The second time, have students mark their answers.  The third time, have students check their answers.  Some example listening exercises include:  true/false, circle the correct response, fill in the missing words, check the items you hear, and write the numbers to put the pictures in order from what you hear.

Now it is time to create your reading, writing, and grammar exercises.  Be sure not to ask students to do something that they have never done before, and do not include any new grammar or vocabulary on the assessment.  Use your checklist to ensure that you have covered all of the objectives you covered during the course, and use a variety of exercises and make them increasingly more difficult as students progress through the assessment.  For the reading assessment, have a short paragraph that students must answer comprehension questions about.  The answers can be writing complete sentences or more simple exercises such as true/false or multiple choice.  Include a short writing exercise where you give students a context and they must write a paragraph or a dialogue.  You can leave it open or give them structure; i.e., have them include specific objectives, grammatical topics, or vocabulary in the writing sample.  If culture was part of the course, be sure to include a section that covers the primary topics covered. 

Go back over the entire exam and assign times to each section to ensure that students will not run out of time on exam day.  As a final step, and this is an important one, create an answer key.  Every time I create an answer key, I find a mistake or something I overlooked in writing the exam.  This step should not be skipped, even if you are the one administering and correcting the exam. 

Writing a thorough and accurate exam is a critical piece to ensuring that students have mastered the learning outcomes for the course.  The key is to plan ahead and use your checklist.  Be sure that you look for more articles in the future on this topic at www.stmpublishing.com/language-teaching-blog.