Creating a fair, reliable, teacher-made test is a challenge. Every year poorly designed tests fail to accurately measure many students' learning--and negatively affect their academic futures. Salend, a well-known writer on assessment for at-risk students who consults with schools on assessment procedures, offers guidelines for creating tests that have greater validity and are more accessible and clearer to students. He gives examples of what makes for a better test in terms of format, readability, legibility, and clarity of directions and prompts. Using actual before-and-after examples, Salend explores the clearest format for specific types of questions: multiple choice, true-false, sentence completion, and essay questions. (Contains 3 figures.)