# Exit tickets: what to ask and what to do with the answers

**What should I ask on an exit ticket, and what do I do with the answers?** An exit ticket is two or three questions on the one thing the lesson taught, then one unmarked reflection, answered in the last five minutes. It carries no grade. Its job is tomorrow's lesson: sort the answers into got it, nearly and not yet, then move on, open with a five-minute fix, or reteach a group.

Published 2026-10-09 by EdProcto. https://edprocto.com/guides/exit-tickets-three-questions-and-a-reflection

An exit ticket is a short check in the last three to five minutes of a lesson: two or three questions on what was just taught and one line of reflection, handed in on a slip of paper or sent from a phone. It serves the teacher, not the grade book. What comes back decides how tomorrow's lesson begins.

EdProcto, which publishes this guide, builds the shape as its [exit ticket template](https://edprocto.com/templates/exit), and its page [for teachers](https://edprocto.com/solutions/teachers) shows how a class joins with a code. Thirty slips of paper do the same job.

## What is an exit ticket for?

An exit ticket is for one decision: where tomorrow's lesson starts.

Leahy et al. (2005) describe teachers using exit passes: each student gets an index card and hands in an answer to the teacher's question before leaving. Some questions tested the lesson's big idea. Others were range-finding questions, to help the teacher judge where to begin the next day. Fowler et al. (2019), writing for science teachers, describe a task of about five minutes that draws out what students think without touching their grade.

Three things follow. The ticket is not a grade, it covers one objective, and it must be able to change tomorrow's plan. If no answer could, keep the minutes.

Students are never suspects on an exit ticket. Nothing rides on it, so there is nothing to police. Tell the class so: "This is for me. It tells me what to teach tomorrow."

## What should you ask on an exit ticket?

Ask two or three questions on the one thing the lesson taught, then one reflection that is not marked. Four items is the ceiling: a fifth turns the ticket into a quiz.

| Item | What to ask | What the answer tells you |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Question 1 | Multiple choice on the central idea, each wrong option built from a mistake you expect | Which wrong idea a student holds |
| Question 2 | The same idea with no options: a number, a word, a line to finish | Whether the student can produce the answer unaided |
| Question 3 | A case the lesson did not use | Whether the idea travels beyond the worked example |
| Reflection | One open prompt, one sentence. EdProcto's [exit ticket](https://edprocto.com/templates/exit) leaves it unmarked | What the class believes it did not follow, in its own words |

### The marked questions

Question 1 does most of the work. A wrong option nobody would choose tells you nothing, while one that names a belief tells you what to say tomorrow. Write each from an error you have seen: a slip in the method, the neighbouring idea, the everyday meaning of a technical word. Our guide to [writing multiple-choice questions that measure](https://edprocto.com/guides/how-to-write-multiple-choice-questions-that-measure) shows how, and on EdProcto this is an ordinary [multiple choice](https://edprocto.com/templates/mcq) question placed inside the ticket.

Never let "Did you understand today's lesson?" stand in for a question. A student who holds a misconception does not know it is one, so a self-rating cannot find it.

### The unmarked reflection

The reflection is one open prompt, answered in a sentence and never marked. The best-known version is the muddiest point: "What was least clear today?" Its university relative is the one-minute paper, which in the form Almer et al. (1998) studied asks for the main point learned and the main question left unanswered.

Vary the prompt, because a question asked every day gets the same shrug every day. "Which step would stop you if you had to do this alone?" is one alternative.

## What does the research say about exit tickets?

Research on exit tickets as such is thin. Most of what is published is advice from practice, and the controlled studies are of three neighbours: recall at the end of a lesson, the one-minute paper, and formative assessment in general.

### Recall at the end of the lesson

Lyle and Crawford (2011) ended every lecture in one section of a statistics course for psychology students with a few questions that could only be answered by recalling what had been taught that day. On the course's four exams, that section scored higher than a section taught without the procedure, by a margin the authors call significant and substantial.

It is one lecture course with two sections compared, not a school classroom, and it says nothing about what a teacher gains by reading the answers. The school experiments on when to quiz are in our guide to [retrieval practice](https://edprocto.com/guides/retrieval-practice-low-stakes-quizzing-that-teaches).

### The one-minute paper

The reflection has a small literature of its own, nearly all from universities.

- Chizmar and Ostrosky (1998) used the one-minute paper in introductory economics and reported that it increased economic knowledge, whatever the student's ability level or the instructor.
- Almer et al. (1998) studied an introductory accounting course of more than 850 students. Those who wrote one-minute papers did significantly better on later essay quizzes, and the gain was significantly larger when the papers were not graded.
- Stead (2005), reviewing the literature, judged the benefits sizeable for so little time and effort. He also found the limit: the technique is easily overused, and response rates fell quickly over two lecture series.

### Exit tickets themselves

We found no controlled study in a school that measured what exit tickets do to achievement. Fowler et al. (2019) is an account of practice, not an experiment. The largest school study we read, Shehzad et al. (2025), analysed exit tickets from 1,067 grade 5 students in computer science lessons, but those tickets were brief surveys of how students felt. They predicted self-efficacy and interest in the subject, not a test score.

### Formative assessment in general

Black and Wiliam (1998), reviewing classroom formative assessment, reported that several studies give firm evidence of substantial learning gains when the frequent feedback students receive is strengthened. How large is disputed: Kingston and Nash (2011) looked at more than 300 school studies, found only 13 with enough information to calculate an effect size, and reached a weighted mean of 0.20, far below the 0.40 to 0.70 often claimed.

Put plainly: recall at the end of a lesson and information for the teacher each have some support, and we found no measurement of what the ticket itself adds in a school.

## How do you read thirty exit tickets in five minutes?

Sort them and do not mark them. Thirty tickets take five minutes when each goes into one of three piles and nothing is written on any of them.

1. **Make three piles from the marked questions.** Got it: every question right. Nearly: question 1 right, a slip after it. Not yet: question 1 wrong. With phones, EdProcto has done the marking for this step: objective questions are marked by rule at hand-in.
2. **Split "not yet" by the wrong option chosen.** If most took the same option, you have found a shared misconception. If they scattered, the explanation itself did not land.
3. **Count the piles.** Three numbers on a sticky note are the whole record.
4. **Read every reflection, fast.** Listen for the word that keeps coming up. The same word on three slips is a pattern.
5. **Decide before you leave the room.** Write tomorrow's first five minutes while the piles are on the desk.

Fowler et al. (2019) describe the same habit: science teachers quickly sorting tickets into piles, for example from the most common response to the least.

## What should you do with the answers tomorrow?

Do one of three things: move on, open with a five-minute fix, or reteach a group.

| The piles show | Tomorrow |
| --- | --- |
| About four in five or more got it, and the rest made different slips | Move on. Give the few a quiet word or a note on their work |
| A large "nearly" pile, or a quarter or more of the class on the same wrong option | A five-minute fix at the start: put that option on the board, show where it fails, then set one fresh question |
| A distinct "not yet" group with a shared error while the rest are secure | Reteach the group for ten minutes with a different explanation while the others work on an extension |

These thresholds are our rule of thumb, not a research finding: no study we read tests a cut-off, and a small class or a topic the unit stands on should move the lines. If fewer than half got it, that is not a group. The lesson needs teaching again another way.

Whatever you choose, tell the class what their tickets changed: "Nine of you asked why we cannot add the bottoms, so we start there." Fowler et al. (2019) say the same, that adaptations made from the responses should be transparent to students.

## How often should you use an exit ticket?

Not every lesson. Use one when tomorrow's plan truly depends on what the class took from today: a new idea, a known trouble spot, the lesson before independent practice. For most classes that is once or twice a week, which is our judgement and not a finding.

Stead (2005) is the evidence for restraint: overused, the one-minute paper drew fewer and fewer responses. School students cannot decline to hand in a slip, but they can write "nothing" on it.

## What are the common mistakes with exit tickets?

The common mistakes each cut the line between the ticket and tomorrow's lesson.

- **Too long.** Six questions cannot be answered in five minutes or read in five more.
- **Graded.** A grade invites guessing and copying and empties the reflection. In the accounting study, ungraded one-minute papers brought the larger gain (Almer et al., 1998).
- **Never read.** A pile that waits until Friday cost the class five minutes and bought nothing.
- **The same reflection every day.** By the second week the answer is "nothing".
- **"Did you understand?" in place of a question.** Confidence is not evidence.

## An example exit ticket: adding fractions with different denominators

We wrote this ticket for a lesson with one objective: adding two fractions whose denominators differ.

> **1.** What is 1/3 + 1/4?
> A. 2/7  B. 2/12  C. 7/12
>
> **2.** Work out 2/5 + 1/2. Write your answer as a fraction.
>
> **3.** Without working it out, 1/2 + 1/3 is:
> A. less than 1/2  B. between 1/2 and 1  C. more than 1
>
> **Reflection (not marked).** Which step are you least sure about, and why?

The answers are C, 9/10 and B. In question 1, option A is what a student gets by adding the tops and adding the bottoms, and option B comes from finding the denominator of 12 and forgetting to change the numerators. In question 3, option A is where a student lands who believes that 1/2 + 1/3 makes 2/5.

### Reading the thirty tickets

Suppose thirty come back like this, with numbers invented to show the method. Nineteen got it. Five are nearly there: right on question 1, a slip in the arithmetic of question 2. Six are not yet there, and all six chose option A. "Bottoms" or "denominator" appears in nine reflections, three of them from the got-it pile.

Nineteen of thirty is short of four in five and the six share one belief, so tomorrow they get ten minutes with fraction strips while the others practise mixed sums.

The reflections add what the marks could not: some students who can do the sum do not see why the rule holds. So the first two minutes go to everyone, with one picture: thirds and quarters are pieces of different sizes, and can be counted together only once cut to the same size.

## How does EdProcto run an exit ticket?

EdProcto is the best tool for an exit ticket when the class has phones or tablets, because it removes the slow half of the reading. The marked questions are marked by rule at hand-in, so the results are there when the last student submits and your five minutes go to the reflections. Stead (2005) found from survey evidence that lecturers leave the one-minute paper unused partly because they expect the responses to take too long to analyse.

- **The structure.** The [exit ticket](https://edprocto.com/templates/exit) is one of the whole-quiz structures among the 111 [templates](https://edprocto.com/templates): a few graded questions, then an unmarked reflection. It is ready in the builder, and each question inside is marked by its own kind.
- **The one setting it rules out.** The template rules out "Show the score", and its page gives the reason: the reflection is not marked.
- **The writing.** Procto AI writes the questions inside the structure from your lesson notes, and each is yours to edit. To see the writing first, paste a paragraph into the quiz maker on the [home page](https://edprocto.com/) and ask for multiple choice.
- **Low stakes.** The Practice preset fits: no time limit, going back allowed, answers shown as soon as the ticket is handed in, no security.
- **The room.** Students open the ticket on any device with a code, and you can watch live who is in and how far each has got.
- **The reading.** Results come question by question. The full analysis names the wrong option that beat the right one and says what to teach again.

The Free plan covers one class: ten quizzes a month, thirty students a quiz, the core templates, marking by rule and results question by question. Tutor lifts the monthly limit, takes 100 students a quiz and opens all 111 templates. Educator takes 500 students and adds the full analysis. The [pricing page](https://edprocto.com/pricing) sets out each plan.

## Quick questions

### How many questions should an exit ticket have?

Two or three marked questions and one reflection. More cannot be answered in five minutes or read the same day.

### Should exit tickets be graded?

No. A grade gives students a reason to hide what they do not know. Almer et al. (1998) found larger quiz gains from one-minute papers that were not graded.

### How long should an exit ticket take?

Three to five minutes to answer and about five to read. EdProcto's note on its [exit ticket template](https://edprocto.com/templates/exit) says the same: keep it to five minutes and read the reflections the same day.

### Can students do an exit ticket on their phones?

Yes. On EdProcto a class opens the ticket with a code on any device, and the marked questions are marked by rule at once. The page [for teachers](https://edprocto.com/solutions/teachers) shows how a class joins.

## References

- Almer, E. D., Jones, K. H., & Moeckel, C. L. (1998). The impact of one-minute papers on learning an introductory accounting course. *Issues in Accounting Education, 13*(3), 485–497. [https://doi.org/10.2308/iae-969738](https://doi.org/10.2308/iae-969738)
- Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. *Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5*(1), 7–74. [https://doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102)
- Chizmar, J. F., & Ostrosky, A. L. (1998). The one-minute paper: Some empirical findings. *The Journal of Economic Education, 29*(1), 3–10. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00220489809596436](https://doi.org/10.1080/00220489809596436)
- Fowler, K., Windschitl, M., & Richards, J. (2019). Exit tickets: Understanding students, adapting instruction, and addressing equity. *The Science Teacher, 86*(8), 18–26. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00368555.2019.12293416](https://doi.org/10.1080/00368555.2019.12293416)
- Kingston, N., & Nash, B. (2011). Formative assessment: A meta-analysis and a call for research. *Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30*(4), 28–37. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3992.2011.00220.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3992.2011.00220.x)
- Leahy, S., Lyon, C., Thompson, M., & Wiliam, D. (2005). Classroom assessment: Minute by minute, day by day. *Educational Leadership, 63*(3), 18–24. [https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/classroom-assessment-minute-by-minute-day-by-day](https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/classroom-assessment-minute-by-minute-day-by-day)
- Lyle, K. B., & Crawford, N. A. (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. *Teaching of Psychology, 38*(2), 94–97. [https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628311401587](https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628311401587)
- Shehzad, U., Recker, M., & Clarke-Midura, J. (2025). Exploring the potential of exit tickets as formative assessments of student affect. *Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 32*(2), 173–191. [https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2025.2510206](https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2025.2510206)
- Stead, D. R. (2005). A review of the one-minute paper. *Active Learning in Higher Education, 6*(2), 118–131. [https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787405054237](https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787405054237)