Exam Wrappers: Not a Silver Bullet

An exam wrapper is a structured activity that students engage in after their instructor has graded and returned an exam, and is designed to promote self-reflection and improve study practices. This paper describes two studies examining the efficacy and student perceptions of exam wrappers. The studies were conducted at two major Canadian universities, using complementary research designs. We report that neither study produced evidence that exam wrappers have a significant effect on final exam scores or on course drop rates. However, we also find that the use of wrappers was associated with improved rates of test pickup and increased scores on a course evaluation question regarding the fairness of evaluation methods. Given these results, we advise instructors who are considering the use of exam wrappers to review the evidence for other possible interventions that may more effectively serve the same goals.

(Full paper originally published as: Ben Stephenson, Michelle Craig, Daniel Zingaro, Diane Horton, Danny Heap, & Elaine Huynh. Exam Wrappers: Not a Silver Bullet. In SIGCSE '2017: Proceedings of the 2017 ASM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 8--11, 2017, Seattle, Washington, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3017680.3017701)