An exit ticket is the smallest piece of assessment there is: one or two questions at the end of the lesson, answered before the students leave the room. You are not grading anyone. You are finding out whether the thing you taught for fifty minutes actually landed, while there is still time to do something about it tomorrow.
Most teachers who have tried it agree it works. Most who have stopped doing it stopped for the same reason: the paper. Thirty slips to hand out, thirty to collect, thirty to read on the train home, and by the time the pattern is clear it is Thursday and the class has moved on.
Three questions are enough
The exit ticket that survives contact with a real timetable is short. Three questions, two of them closed, and the whole thing done in three minutes:
- One thing from today, in your own words. A free-text line. You are looking for the shape of the answer, not the spelling. If half the class writes about the example and nobody writes about the rule, you know what to open with next time.
- How clear was today's lesson? A rating from 1 to 5. This is the number you track over the term. One low day is noise; three low days in a row are a signal.
- What should we go over again? Either a free-text line or a yes/no: "Do you want to see the worked example once more?" The yes/no version is faster and good enough most days.
Resist the urge to add a fourth. The point of an exit ticket is that the students will do it every time. Four questions becomes a survey, and surveys get skipped.
Why anonymous answers are more useful
For a check on your own teaching, you want honesty more than you want names. A student who writes "I still don't get the second part" on a signed slip is taking a small risk; on an anonymous one, none. The rating question in particular only means something when nobody is being polite to you.
There is a second reason. When the answers are anonymous you can show the class the result straight away: "Twelve of you said the example was the clearest part, eight asked for the rule again. We will start there tomorrow." That closes the loop in front of them, and students who see their feedback used keep giving it.
If you need to know who has understood what, that is a different tool: a short live quiz with names, earlier in the lesson, where being wrong costs nothing but points.
Running it on their phones
The paper problem goes away when the exit ticket is on the device the students already have in their hands. The flow that works in a real classroom looks like this:
- The students joined the lesson at the start with a code on the board, the same code they used for the slides. They have not opened anything new since.
- Three minutes before the end, you start the survey from your panel. On every student's screen the slide gives way to the form.
- They answer; the count on your panel climbs from 0 to 27 while you pack up.
- You close it. The averages and the free-text answers are on your screen before the room is empty.
In ClassTogether this is the end-of-course survey: a ready template with exactly the questions above (an overall rating, the pace, clarity, "would you recommend it", and two open questions), or your own set. It is anonymous, one answer per device, and the results download as a CSV if you want to put the term's ratings on a chart.
What to do with the answers
The exit ticket earns its three minutes only if you act on it, and that is quicker than it sounds:
- Read the free text once, that evening. You are sorting into two piles: "got it" and "did not". Five minutes for a class of thirty.
- Open the next lesson with the "did not" pile. Not a full re-teach: the worked example again, or the rule stated a second way. Ten minutes, and the students who asked for it notice you listened.
- Watch the rating, not the single day. Keep the weekly average somewhere you will see it. A slow drift downwards usually means the pace crept up, not that the topic got harder.
A rule that keeps it alive: never start the exit ticket after the bell. Three minutes before the end, every time, or the students learn that it is optional.