Stale questions

I love November as it comes with 'THE END' of  teaching for the semester. While I love the subject that I taught this semester, it being an under-grad course I had a large class to handle and it was hard to keep it together for the whole semester. It is a little weird that over the years one of the aspects I used to rather enjoy in the beginning of my teaching career has slowly  become something I am finding myself disliking more and more every passing year and that is preparing question papers for exams. God, how I used to sit with various books and come up with each question that would be easy to comprehend but would require good understanding for one to be able to answer all parts of it. Yes, each question used to have at least three parts, two of them would test their basic skills but the third/last part would test their intuitive understanding. In effect I would end up giving my undivided attention to the making of any exam paper a minimum of two to three days! And of course since these problems were all self-made they didn't come with their ready solutions. So another good chunk of time used to go for that. And then I would eagerly wait in anticipation for the exam to get over to take a look at the answer books to see if students got it or not. 

It was of course a lot of fun and excitement at that point in time and I thoroughly enjoyed doing things that way but now things are different. There are so many things I feel committed to that putting in that kind of time and effort seems a complete waste and therefore have resigned to using, god forbid, ready made questions with ready made solutions. Sacrilege!