Teaching Strategies

Exit Tickets

An exit ticket is a brief activity completed at the end of class that can serve to gauge student learning, improve student metacognition, and provide some targeted feedback about students’ experience in the class period.The cycle of collecting an exit ticket, acting on it, and then collecting another one, helps keep communication between you and your students honest and open, which can increase student engagement, learning, and sense of belonging in the course. This resource provides an overview of key considerations when using exit tickets in your class, categories of exit tickets with example questions, and options for collecting exit tickets. 

The content of an exit ticket, and how frequently you ask students to submit one, depends on your course and your learning goals. For example, you may find it useful to ask a different multiple choice question at the end of each class in order to check student understanding of new material. Or, you might find it more helpful to ask an open-ended question once a month that asks students to surface lingering questions or reflect on their learning in a particular class session.

The primary benefit of an exit ticket is to collect information about a particular class period. If you are looking for more general information about students’ experience in your course as a whole, you might consider gathering mid-semester feedback. In either case, whenever you are responding to student feedback, it can be helpful to spend some time thinking about how you want to interpret and prioritize student comments.

Considerations When Using Exit Tickets

As you think about implementing exit tickets in your class, here are some considerations and general suggestions. Keep these in mind as you look at the example questions on the following page.

  • 1 Question, 1 Minute: Students may become overwhelmed if you ask them to spend too much time completing an exit ticket. We recommend that students spend no more than a minute or two writing their answer, which usually means just asking one or two questions at a time.
  • Determine frequency: If you are checking for student understanding, a different question at the end of most classes could be useful for both you and your students. If, instead, you are asking questions that may elicit changes to student or instructor behavior, give everyone some time for students to experience those adjustments before soliciting additional feedback.
  • Close the loop: When students submit their exit ticket, they want to know you have read it and are doing something with that information. For questions with a correct answer, make sure to share that answer with students, either in the following class, a Canvas Announcement, or a recorded video. For more general feedback, share the feedback you received and any changes you plan to make based on it.
  • Consider how you will grade: Generally, leaving exit tickets ungraded or grading them complete/incomplete will keep the focus on the information in the tickets rather than correctness, and can keep student stress levels down.
  • Consider going anonymous: If you are interested in student responses as a whole, rather than who submitted what, you can make submissions anonymous. You will want to make sure that exit tickets are anonymous if you are soliciting any feedback on your teaching practice, so that students are able to answer honestly. However you decide to collect information, let students know whether their submissions will be anonymous or not. 

For more information about using exit tickets in your class, see the next page on Sample Questions & Submission Options.