2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Student-Generated Exam Questions in Microprocessor Courses

Microprocessors is a fundamental and required class for most (if not all) electrical and computer engineering students. These courses typically have lectures and laboratory sessions. To enhance the understanding of the subjects covered in the lecture, students complete hands-on experiments during the lab sessions. However, students can further benefit from being engaged in the lecture session, especially with topics that are abstract by nature (e.g., calculating the 2’s complement and memory address decoding). Furthermore, it has been shown that student engagement in their own learning has many benefits such as deeper understanding, higher retention, improved academic performance, and enhanced communication skills. This paper presents an active-learning approach in which the students are engaged in their own learning and assessment design.

The students work in groups to generate questions and solutions to topics covered in the class, as practice for an upcoming exam. The students upload their work to the course’s online platform prior to the exam-review lecture and then present their work to their classmates during the review. The instructor moderates the presentations and provides feedback when necessary. The instructor selects one or more of these questions to be included in the exam.

To assess the benefits of this approach, the instructor composes similar questions and/or augments the questions with extended challenges (i.e., the instructor builds upon the questions). The instructor compares the evaluations of the student-generated questions to the evaluations of similar, instructor-composed questions that were given on a different test. Furthermore, the instructor compares the evaluations of the student-generated questions and the extended challenges to assess the impact of this approach on deeper understanding of the topics.

The outcomes were positively received by the students and by the instructors. The students were motivated by the guaranteed points on the exam and benefited from deeper understanding of the topics. Furthermore, students demonstrated responsibility and creativity while working in groups and designing the questions. The exam assessment demonstrated a deeper understanding of the topics for which the students designed a question.