Where do your exit tickets actually go? (Probably not your gradebook)

Picture the last five minutes of a lesson. You hand out a quick question — "explain in one sentence what we covered today" — collect the slips of paper at the door, and tell yourself you'll go through them tonight.

Be honest: how many of those piles actually made it into your gradebook this term?

A great idea that quietly fails in practice

Exit tickets are one of the most evidence-backed formative assessment techniques there is. A 60-second check at the end of a lesson tells you, before tomorrow's lesson plan is even finished, who's ready to move on and who needs to revisit the topic. In theory, it's the cheapest, fastest feedback loop in teaching.

In practice, the loop breaks at the handover. The slips get collected, stacked, carried to the staff room, and — more often than anyone wants to admit — never actually marked. Not because teachers don't care, but because turning forty handwritten scraps of paper into usable data is a second job stacked on top of the first one. So the insight that exit tickets are supposed to generate ("Group B didn't get fractions — replan tomorrow") arrives too late to be useful, if it arrives at all.

The real cost isn't the marking — it's the missed signal

The damage isn't really the lost ten minutes of marking time. It's that the entire point of an exit ticket — catching a misunderstanding before it compounds — depends on seeing the result the same day. A pile of paper on your desk on Friday tells you what Tuesday's class struggled with. By then you've already taught Wednesday and Thursday on the assumption that they were fine.

Closing the loop without adding a step

The fix isn't "try harder to mark them" — it's removing the gap between the answer and the record entirely. If a student answers on a screen instead of paper, and that answer lands directly in a gradebook category you've already set up, there's no stack to carry, no evening of transcription, and no delay between "they answered" and "you know."

That's the whole idea behind Classroom Hub's exit tickets. They run live on the Classroom Screen at the end of the lesson — students answer on the board, you see the results in real time, and the scores sync straight into the weighted gradebook category you've already configured. No stack of slips. No evening of transcription. The signal arrives while it can still change tomorrow's lesson plan.

If "I'll mark these tonight" is a sentence you've said more often than you'd like to admit, it might be worth trying a version of the exit ticket that marks itself.

See it for yourself: Classroom Hub's exit tickets are included in every plan, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required.