Exit Ticket Examples
An exit ticket is a short written response collected at the end of a lesson. Its purpose is not to grade the lesson; it is to tell you what tomorrow has to contain.
That framing decides everything about the design. A ticket that asks students to summarise what they learned produces a stack of pleasant, useless paragraphs. A ticket that asks them to do the thing produces a sorted picture of who can.
It also has to be sortable in the five minutes you actually have, or it becomes a stack on the desk that quietly stops being collected.
The three questions worth asking
Almost every useful exit ticket is one of three types, and choosing deliberately between them is most of the skill.
The first is a performance item: one problem exactly like the ones the lesson taught. It answers whether they can do it, which is usually the question that matters.
The second is a discrimination item: two examples, one of which is wrong, and the student says which and why. This catches the students who can execute a procedure without understanding when it applies — invisible to a performance item.
The third is a confusion prompt: "what is still unclear?" It is the only one that surfaces things you did not anticipate, and it is the one to use after introducing something genuinely new. Used every day it decays into "nothing", so keep it occasional.
Examples by subject
The discrimination column takes longer to write and reveals considerably more. Where a lesson has taught a procedure with a common misapplication, it is nearly always the better choice.
| Subject | Performance item | Discrimination item |
|---|---|---|
| Maths | Solve 3(x + 4) = 27 | Two students expanded 3(x + 4). One wrote 3x + 4. Which is wrong and what did they do? |
| Science | Name the independent variable in this experiment | Two hypotheses for the same experiment — which is testable and why? |
| English | Write one sentence using a semicolon correctly | Two sentences, one with a comma splice. Which needs fixing? |
| History | Give one cause and one consequence of the event | Two statements about the source — which is inference and which is fact? |
| Geography | Read the population off this pyramid for ages 0–4 | Two pyramids — which shows an ageing population? |
Sorting the stack in five minutes
The temptation to grade them is what kills the practice. An exit ticket is diagnostic, and the moment it carries marks, students start writing what they think will score rather than what they actually think — which destroys the only thing it was for.
- Do not mark them. Sort into three piles: got it, partly, not yet.
- Count the piles and write the three numbers on your plan. That is the record.
- Read only the "not yet" pile properly, looking for the shared error rather than individual mistakes.
- Write one sentence on the plan: what tomorrow opens with.
- Return the tickets only if you have written something on them; otherwise keep them and act on them instead.
What the piles tell you to do
The proportions map onto four fairly reliable responses.
Nearly all in "got it": move on, and give the two or three who did not a five-minute conversation tomorrow rather than reteaching the class.
Roughly half and half: open tomorrow with the misconception itself. Put the common wrong answer on the board — anonymously — and have the class work out what happened. This is a better lesson than the reteach.
Nearly all in "not yet": do not reteach the same way. Something in the explanation did not work, and repeating it louder produces the same result. Change the representation — concrete for abstract, diagram for symbols, a worked pair instead of a rule.
Split with no pattern: the ticket was ambiguous rather than the lesson. Reread the question you asked.
Keeping the last four minutes
The most common reason exit tickets stop is that lessons overrun and the four minutes disappear. Plan them into the sequence rather than treating them as what happens if there is time.
A practical guard is to write the ticket question on the board at the start of the lesson. Students see where the lesson is going, and you have committed publicly to reaching it.
Keep the format identical every time — same slip, same place to hand in, same procedure. A ticket that costs a minute of instructions is a ticket that gets dropped in a busy week, and the routine is what makes four minutes actually four.
Digital versus paper
A digital form sorts itself and gives instant totals, which is genuinely useful for a performance item with a right answer. It also fails whenever the network does, and it consumes device time in classrooms where devices are shared.
Paper is faster to hand out, works everywhere, and lets you fan a stack into three piles in ninety seconds. For discrimination items and confusion prompts, where the value is in the wording of what students wrote, paper is generally easier to read at speed.
Neither is superior in principle. The one that survives is the one that costs you nothing to run on a bad day, which is a question about your room rather than about the format.
Frequently asked questions
One question that asks students to do the thing the lesson taught, rather than to summarise it. A single performance item or a two-example discrimination item both work; a "what did you learn today" prompt does not.
No. They are diagnostic, and the moment they carry marks students write what they think will score rather than what they actually think — which removes the only information the ticket was collecting.
Three to four minutes to complete and under five to sort. Anything longer stops being run in a busy week, and a practice that only happens on calm days is not a practice.
Do not reteach the same way. Change the representation — a diagram instead of symbols, a concrete model instead of a rule, a worked pair instead of an explanation. Repeating the original explanation reproduces the original result.