Final FRE 201 – Fall 2016 – Final Composition Activity
This is a the essay prompt for the composition exercice at the end of French III’s final exam. The whole test was a collaborative work with a series of drills. We constructed it as a team of 5 instructors from the 5 sections of French III. This is one of the exercices I made.
Challenges faced and how I dealt with them:
- These two prompts give student a choice of what they wanted to write about. It reflects cultural relevance as much as possible since students are asked to write a letter in French to their home family imagining themselves studying abroad in a Francophone country. They are supposed to use different tenses and modes to reflect on their experience so far.
- However, the prompt was judged by my colleagues as too long and too detailed. I made it this way for the sake of clarity, but after discussing with the team of instructors, we decided to simplify it and cut it short.
- Through this experience creating final exams, I learned that although clarity is one of my main principles (i.e. Teaching Philosophy), brevity is also paramount when constructing material and prompts that students have to go through in the context of tests.
Valentin Duquet 