Guidelines
for preparing examinations

Persons who wish to use the exams we have prepared on their own site, or to use them as a basis for their own further work, and who have the Hot Potatoes product, can download any of our exams and the workfile for them by changing the .htm extension of the URL for the exam to .zip and downloading, unzipping the file, and installing them all in the same directory. To do further work, just load the workfile, which will have an extension beginning with the letter "j", into Hot Potatoes and proceed. Note that there are not .zip files for all exams. We usually only prepare them after pausing in developing an exam for a while.

Half-Baked Software, the authors of Hot Potatoes, are planning to abandon support for HTML output, so I recommend not selecting the "Output to HTML" (V3) option, but only the "Output to DHTML" (V4) option.

People are welcome to develop their own exams and contribute them to us. But we ask that you follow these guidelines:

  1. All questions must have a single correct answer that most intelligent people can agree is correct after studying the reading material offered.
  2. No questions should ask the student to agree with the doctrinal opinions of the exam author. Questions may only ask about what the opinions are of the author of the reading material. This includes court opinions, which are always to be treated as merely the opinions of the judges, and not necessarily authoritative. The aim is discovery, not indoctrination.
  3. The correct answer should not be obvious. In multiple choice exams, there should be at least one incorrect answer that is close enough to being correct that the student must understand a subtle distinction in the reading material, requiring careful reading.
  4. No questions should depend on knowledge not available in the reading material presented.
  5. Since exams can be presented in either a fixed question order, or in random question order, the questions should be composed to be consistent with the mode chosen. If in random order, the questions should not depend on, or have their correct answer suggested by, another question. If in fixed order, later questions should only depend on previous questions and their answers, and should avoid doing so to the extent possible so that each question is independent of all the others.
  6. Recommend links to question-specific reading material be inserted with the "_blank" target option, especially if the material is lengthy, so that the material comes up in a new window that can be moved or resized.
  7. The selection of reading material, under the "File" menu option, in the right side frame, is for material that is relevant to all the questions in the exam, so it should be something all of the questions reference, even if one or more links to some additional reading material is provided in the question panel.
  8. If a link to additional reading material is provided in the answer response, the response should be followed with "To return click on your browser's BACK button." or equivalent words.
  9. If more than one link to reading material is provided in the question panel, each should have a brief title. Book titles should be surrounded by italics tags <I>...</I>, and article titles in quotes.