The purpose of the study was to examine the quality of open test questions directed to high school and college students. One thousand five hundred examination questions from various fields of study were examined using criteria based on the writing centers directions and guidelines. The 273 questions that did not fulfill the criteria were analyzed in this study. The commonest mistakes found were: inappropriate usage of action verbs (66%); errors in formulation (13.1%) and the use of titles instead of questions (9.5%). In my opinion, the two most important findings of the study are the high percentage of inappropriate use of action verbs and inadequate number of points given to questions, since these findings were not described previously. The study results suggest that training teachers in question-writing should be incorporated in the curriculum for pre-service and in-service teachers. Various ways of composing more coherent test questions are described after presenting and discussing the mistake types.