Turn your exit ticket into a diagnostic that plans tomorrow

Turn your exit ticket into a diagnostic that plans tomorrow

Most exit tickets close the lesson. Good ones tell you what to teach tomorrow.

The prompt

You are helping a teacher design an exit ticket that DIAGNOSES the lesson, not one that closes it.

Context I'll give you:
- Subject: [SUBJECT]
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL]
- Learning intention for today's lesson, in one sentence: [LEARNING INTENTION]
- Curriculum reference (ACARA v9.0 or your state's equivalent), if known: [OPTIONAL]
- The three sub-skills a student needs to meet that intention: [SUB-SKILL 1], [SUB-SKILL 2], [SUB-SKILL 3]
- Time students have: 5 minutes, on paper.
- What "most students got it" means to me: [e.g. 80% correct on Q1 and Q2]

Do this in order.

1. Draft an exit ticket of exactly 3 questions. Each question targets ONE sub-skill from the list, in the order I gave them. Do not combine sub-skills in a question. Do not include a "how confident are you" question; I want performance data, not affect.

2. Under each question, tell me:
   (a) What a response that meets the intention looks like.
   (b) The single most likely wrong answer, and what misconception it reveals.
   (c) How long that question should take a student who knows the material.

3. Give me a decision tree for tomorrow's do-now, keyed to the marking results:
   - If most students missed Q1, tomorrow's do-now is: [a specific 5-minute activity, described].
   - If most students missed Q2, tomorrow's do-now is: [a specific 5-minute activity, described].
   - If most students missed Q3, tomorrow's do-now is: [a specific 5-minute activity, described].
   - If most students got all three, tomorrow moves on: describe what to teach next and why.

Constraints:
- Australian English.
- Age-appropriate language for the year level I named.
- No digital tools required; students write in their books.
- No "reflection" prompts. This is a diagnostic.

What it does well

Tying each question to one and only one sub-skill stops you writing another "what did you learn today" ticket. The decision tree turns Monday morning's do-now into a five-minute build against a real data point, not a hunch.

Where it falls over

It cannot tell you which sub-skills matter for your lesson. Fuzzy sub-skills in, fuzzy questions out. And three questions cannot cover a lesson that had genuinely five moving parts, so sometimes the honest move is running the exit ticket over two lessons and treating the second one as the diagnostic.

Try it like this

• For Year 8 maths on linear equations: sub-skills = "collect like terms", "distribute a negative correctly", "verify a solution by substitution". Ticket writes itself.
• For VCE English on a set text: sub-skills = "identify the author's construction", "distinguish views from values", "cite evidence with page number". Drop the "verify" question; keep the misconception layer.
• If you only have five minutes to plan tonight: run the prompt with two sub-skills and ask for two questions instead of three. Still better than closing the lesson blind.

Then let the ticket, not vibes, choose Monday's do-now.