Writing a good exam paper is an art, dependent on familiarity with the module and its learning outcomes, in particular knowledge of students' target linguistic level, their knowledge of grammatical structures and the breadth of their vocabulary, as well as on experience of how candidates are likely to understand and interpret questions. You will only get better by doing it, but here are some general notes for guidance:

• Don't work in a vacuum: look at colleagues' previous exam papers for this module. You probably don't have to follow slavishly what they have done, but this will give you a good idea of the expected standard and syllabus coverage.
• Fairly obviously, it is important to base exam papers on the type of material covered in the module and not to ask students to engage in any tasks they have no experience of - eg don't get them to write about nuclear energy in France if the module has only covered the topics of transport, the churches and education, or to translate or do a summary if these skills have not been practised during the course.
• As you write an exam paper, keep asking yourself what you are assessing; across a language paper, ensure you are not repeatedly testing the same thing - eg grammar may figure prominently not just in explicit gap-filling exercises but in translations and comprehensions too; the same might apply to a particular body of vocabulary: vary the language and topics featured in the different exercises you employ. Both these questions relate to validity (see 13.1.4.1).
• Show your draft exam paper to a colleague so as to get a second opinion on appropriateness of material and level of difficulty, and to enlist a second pair of eyes for proofreading: it is so easy to let typos through, and quite apart from the fact that these look very bad and unprofessional on printed exam papers, they can also mislead students and cause them to waste time puzzling them out. It is obviously better still if your department has a policy whereby teams of staff moderate draft papers and questions.
• Ensure questions and rubrics are unambiguous, especially where alternative questions are offered, and if the rubric is in the FL make sure in advance that students are familiar with typical terminology (see also Module 14, section 14.4.4 on target-language testing).
• Run through the questions yourself. For example, if you set a gap-filling grammar exercise and offer a box with possible answers, do the exercise yourself to ensure the number of gaps matches the number of possibilities offered (or, if you don't want an exact match, warn the students on the paper that this is the case).
• Include a clear indication on the paper of how many marks are allocated to each question (and make sure your sub-sections add up!)
• For anything other than an objective test (eg multiple-choice), prepare a detailed mark scheme (eg all the points that need to be mentioned in a comprehension task, a summary or an essay) and do this when you write the paper so the material is fresh in your mind, not when you come to mark the papers two or three months later and you cannot recall exactly what you intended when you wrote the exam.
• If you are preparing a mark scheme that will be used by colleagues, it must be especially clear; you should indicate acceptable alternative answers, show the method for assessing translations or essays by attaching appropriate criteria, and explain any objective scoring method for assessing accuracy (see Module 14, section 14.2.3 on objective marking).
• In preparing a mark scheme for essays, it is a good idea to allow more marks than stated in the question as it is very difficult for students to know exactly what you are looking for; so, if you 'officially' allow 15 marks for content points in an essay and you specify in your mark scheme the 15 points you are looking for, you might in practice make 20 or 25 marks available for the question so that students who tackle the question slightly differently from the way you have and come up with other points, can still gain good marks. Alternatively, in comprehensions, where there is a finite number of points mentioned in the text but it would be unreasonable (eg because of time pressure in a listening test) to expect students to list them all, you might include in your mark scheme all 16 points but only expect students to list 12 of them.