Creative and critical thinking which requires higher-order thinking skills have become one of the core competencies members of the 21^st competitive societies are expected to possess. Accordingly, educational institutions are supposed to raise individuals equipped with these competencies, and expectations from universities are relatively much higher than those from institutions of other educational levels most probably due to the fact that their target mass is generally comprised of young adults who are perceived as a sort of investment for the future of their countries. Universities tend to organize their graduate and undergraduate programs considering this particular fact into account. In order to see to what extent they have accomplished the goals and objectives of raising individuals needed by the society, they inevitably employ assessment tools designed to assess the competencies students are expected to gain in theoretical and practical courses. Consequently, assessment types which promote critical and creative thinking skills have started to gain significance especially in higher education. Not surprisingly, written exams are extensively used as conventional tools in most countries with the aim of evaluating students’ performance through questions which primarily aim to measure cognitive aspect of their knowledge. There is an approximate consensus among scholars on the idea that a reliable exam paper should include questions of various difficulty levels that are designed to assess student knowledge in a fair and cautious way. However, it is known that teaching staff working at institutions of higher education are more inclined to come up with exams comprised of relatively less demanding and challenging questions which could be easily responded using lower-order thinking skills. In consequence, students tend to identify the questions requiring practical and reflective knowledge as ‘unfair, illegitimate or even meaningless’ (Black, 1999: 129). Similarly, Killen (2002) points out that teachers should structure learning tasks that will require students to go beyond following simple routines and manipulating knowledge, and test their knowledge accordingly. Existing literature indicates that test-expectancies encourage studying that appropriately matches the demand of the anticipated test (Thiede et al., 2011; Finley & Benjamin, 2012).

Jensen et al. (2014) reported that students who were administered exams including high-level questions gain a deep conceptual understanding of the instructional materials, and tend to retain the knowledge acquired in the courses longer, confirming the proposed hierarchical nature of the Bloom’s taxonomy, which is accepted as a well-established framework offering six core levels of assessment based on thinking patterns they require. More specifically, it is a system that classifies educational objectives based on the level of student understanding needed for achievement or mastery of certain skills. They represent intellectual activity of the six levels: (i) knowledge, (ii) comprehension, (iii) application, (iv) analysis, (v) synthesis, and (vi) evaluation. The first two levels require minimal levels of understanding, and lower-order thinking skills (Zoller, 1993; Crowe et al., 2008). The level of application is identified as an intermediate level (Crowe et al., 2008) while the remaining three levels are considered to require higher-order thinking skills (Zoller, 1993). Taking the above-mentioned literature into account, this study is intended to analyse assessment practices used in higher education with respect to the Bloom’s taxonomy. It specifically deals with examining written assessment practices used in a state university in Turkey, and aims to identify the questions used in these practices based on the taxonomy in concern. Accordingly, two broad research questions were addressed.

1. Which level(s) of the Blooms taxonomy are more prevalent in written assessment practices in higher education in Turkey?
2. Are higher- or lower-order thinking skills more required in responding to the questions posed in written assessment practices in higher education in Turkey?

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