Midterms mark an important point in the semester. Students complete the assessment, instructors and grading teams work through the responses, grades are returned and the class moves on to the next unit.
But grading should not be the end of the process.
A completed midterm creates a valuable set of data about student learning. Beyond individual grades, assessment results can show where students are struggling, which concepts they have mastered, whether common misconceptions are emerging and where instruction may need to shift before the final exam.
The midpoint of the semester provides something the end of the semester does not: time to act on what the assessment data reveals.
Look Beyond the Average
An overall class average provides a quick snapshot of performance, but it rarely tells the full story.
Start at the question-level analytics. Which questions had the lowest average scores? Did students struggle with questions connected to the same concept? Did a particular type of problem consistently cause difficulty?
These patterns can help distinguish an isolated difficult question from a broader gap in understanding.
This reflects the principles behind formative assessment. The OECD describes formative assessment and feedback as an ongoing process of understanding students’ progress toward learning goals and then using that information to guide feedback and instruction. The organization points to a strong body of evidence showing that identifying students’ current levels of understanding and responding to that information can have a significant impact on learning.
A midterm provides an ideal checkpoint for doing exactly that.
Connect Results to Learning Outcomes
Question-level performance becomes even more useful when instructors connect questions back to course learning outcomes.
Consider grouping questions according to the concepts or skills they assess. Students might demonstrate a strong understanding of foundational knowledge but struggle when asked to apply it to an unfamiliar problem. Or several poorly performing questions might all connect to the same learning outcome.
Looking at results this way shifts the focus from “How did students perform on the exam?” to “What have students demonstrated that they understand?”
That distinction matters because assessment should help instructors make decisions about what happens next.
If students have clearly mastered one outcome, instructional time may be better spent elsewhere. If another outcome remains a consistent challenge, it may deserve additional practice or explanation before students encounter it again on the final.
Look for Patterns in Student Mistakes
Scores tell you where students lost marks. Their responses can tell you why.
Look for mistakes that appear repeatedly across the class. Students may use the same incorrect formula, skip the same step in a calculation or repeatedly misunderstand what a question is asking.
Multiple-choice distractors can provide similar insight. If a large percentage of students select the same incorrect answer, that choice may represent a specific misconception rather than a random error.
Feedback patterns can reveal these trends too. If graders repeatedly leave the same comment across dozens of responses, that feedback may point to an issue worth addressing with the entire class.
The evidence supporting effective feedback is extensive. The Education Endowment Foundation’s evidence review examined research on how different approaches to feedback affect student attainment. Its broader guidance emphasizes using formative assessment to identify learning gaps and providing feedback that helps move learning forward.
The goal is not simply to identify mistakes. It is to use those mistakes to determine what students need next.
Turn Assessment Data Into Action
Assessment analytics only become valuable when they influence what happens after the assessment.
Fortunately, responding to the data does not necessarily require redesigning the rest of the course.
An instructor might spend ten minutes revisiting a difficult concept in the next lecture, create a targeted practice problem, record a short clarification video or dedicate office hours to a misconception that appeared throughout the midterm.
Feedback can also help students decide what they should do next.
A large meta-analysis referenced by the OECD examined 435 studies on feedback and found that feedback containing information about the task, students’ processes or strategies, and self-regulation was particularly effective for learning.
In other words, knowing that an answer was wrong is less useful than understanding why it was wrong and what needs to change next time.
Don’t Forget to Evaluate the Assessment
Student performance can also tell you something about the assessment itself.
Look for questions with unexpected results. If nearly every student struggled with a particular question, consider whether the difficulty came from the concept or the way the question was designed.
Similarly, examine the overall distribution of scores. Was the assessment appropriately challenging? Did the results align with what you expected based on students’ performance throughout the course? If multiple sections completed the same assessment, did similar patterns appear across each section?
For courses with large grading teams, the midpoint is also a good opportunity to review grading consistency. Differences in how graders interpret a rubric or award partial credit can become more significant across hundreds of responses.
Finding those issues after the midterm gives the teaching team an opportunity to clarify expectations before the next major assessment.
Five Crowdmark Insights Worth Revisiting After Midterms
If you use Crowdmark, much of the information needed for this review already exists within your assessment workflow. Before closing the book on your midterm, consider revisiting:
1. Question-level performance: Identify questions where students performed particularly well or poorly and look for patterns across related concepts.
2. Multiple-choice analytics: Review question difficulty, discrimination and distractor performance to understand how individual questions performed and which incorrect responses attracted students.
3. Score distributions: Look beyond the class average to understand how performance was distributed across the assessment.
4. Comment patterns: Review frequently used feedback from your grading team. Repeated comments can reveal mistakes or misconceptions affecting a larger portion of the class.
5. Student performance: Look at performance across assessments to identify areas where students are improving and where additional support may still be needed.
The goal is not to collect more data. It is to make better use of the data your assessments already generate.
Don’t Wait Until the End of the Semester
Assessment data often gets another look after final grades are submitted, when instructors begin thinking about what they might change the next time they teach the course.
That reflection is valuable, but it cannot help the students who generated the data in the first place.
Midterms offer a different opportunity.
There is still time to clarify a misconception. There is still time to provide targeted practice. There is still time to adjust an upcoming assessment or help students understand where they should focus their studying.
The OECD’s research on formative assessment emphasizes this cycle: understand student thinking, respond with appropriate feedback and instructional changes, and continue assessing as learning progresses.
So before moving on from your midterm, take another look at the results.
The grades tell you what happened. The data can help you decide what happens next.