Many undergraduate biology instructors incorporate active learning exercises into their lessons while continuing to assess students with traditional exams. To better align practice and exams, we present an approach to question-asking that emphasizes templates instead of specific questions. Students and instructors can use these Test Question Templates (TQTs) to generate many variations of questions for pre-exam practice and for the exams themselves. TQTs are specific enough to show students which material they should master, yet general enough to keep the exact exam questions a surprise and easy to change from term to term. TQTs generate biology problems analogous to other STEM disciplines' standard problems whose general format is known to students in advance. TQTs thus help instructors ask more exam questions at the higher-order cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy, while empowering students to prepare actively and creatively for such questions.