Quizzes, Tests, & Exams
Quizzes, Tests, and Exams
Types,
Bloom bases, guidelines, construction
Test Item Writing
Basic
testing item formats, brief writing guide for the test items and template
examples
What are Multiple Choice Questions?
Definition,
Advantages, Problems and so on.
Scoring And Statistics in MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions)
1.
Negative Marking, To use or not to use?
2. Applying negative marking….
Quizzes, Tests, and Exams
A
course might have three or four tests. A quiz is even more limited and
usually is administered in fifteen minutes or less. Though these distinctions
are useful, the terms test and exam will be used interchangeably throughout
the rest of this section because the principles in planning, constructing,
and administering them are similar.
Allaying Students' Anxieties About Tests
Anxiety
can interfere with students' performance on tests. You can reduce students'
anxiety and enhance their performance by taking care in how you prepare
students for an exam, how you administer and return the test, and how
you handle makeup tests. The suggestions in this page are designed to
help you prepare your students to do their best on tests.
Designing
and Managing Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)
Bloom's Taxonomy & Application of Bloom's Taxonomy to the design
of MCQs
Designing MCQs- Do's and don'ts
General
considerations : The task of designing good MCQs may be simplified by
referring to past student work such as tutorials, class tests and examination
answers, as these are rich sources of the type of errors and misconceptions
which students frequently expose. MCQs designed with this material at
hand will be relevant to the subject area and will be taken seriously
by the students.
Designing
and Managing MCQs: Guidelines for the use of Question Mark in the Faculty
of Health Sciences
These
guidelines were taken from a meeting of Health Science staff members
on 1999/11/18. They are not meant to be prescriptive, and no staff member
is bound by these. The chief reason for these guidelines is to have
some degree of consistency across the Faculty so that the students find
the environment of the test familiar and non-threatening, and are more
concerned with the subject matter at heart than the particular vagaries
of the software.
Educational
Finals
Well
designed finals, however, serve to highlight important information.
They show the links between ideas. They draw connections to the importance
of this knowledge. Now is the time to review your finals and look for
ways to assure that students are learning these valuable lessons as
they respond to your final assignments. Here are some tips to help.
Planning an Examination
The
second big step is to plan an individual test. Many professors have
found this two-dimensional chart helpful when planning an exam. For
something like a mid-term or final, you would list 3 to 5 main topics
that were studied during the preceding period (~A,B,C).
Criteria for Evaluating Individual Test
Questions
Once
you have planned the whole exam as described above, you are ready to
write individual test questions. This sheet offers some suggestions
for writing good multiple-choice questions and essay questions.
Give frequent quizzes
One
excellent science teacher gives students practice quizzes (of 10 to
15 minutes duration) throughout the quarter. "I don't grade the
quizzes," he explains, "but I do read them and review any
material with which a large number of students seemed to have difficulty.
I also seek out any students who seem to be having real problems understanding
the material and spend more time with them in my office or in the departmental
course cents."
Schedule an oral quiz with each student
One
teacher of engineering reports giving oral quizzes in which a student
is given a series of problems to solve on the blackboard in his office.
He has found this technique invaluable in understanding how students
tackle problems.
Ask students to define, associate or apply
concepts
Instead of waiting until the midterm or final to find out how many students
understand the material, try handing out a short questionnaire or quiz
on the basic concepts covered that day and give the students time (10
to 20 minutes) to complete them at the end of the hour.
Use test questions similar to those used
in homework
Questions
on midterms and final exams should not take a form radically different
from those which you use in quizzes, homework assignments, lecture or
discussion. For example, if you emphasize higher order questions throughout
the course, your midterm and final should not focus narrowly on memorization
or simple multiple choice. Students should have the opportunity to demonstrate
their mastery of the material in the same ways you have emphasized in
your presentation of it.
Prepare students for challenging test
questions
By
identifying the x and y and informing them of the comparative nature
of the examination, she alerts students to what to prepare for, what
to get down "cold." She also lets students know that her exams
are "open book" where they can bring in x and y and any notes
they have made or anything else they think will be useful.
Ask specific questions
It
is difficult for a student to respond to a question like, "Discuss
the implications of the Monroe Doctrine." Students have no sense
of boundaries or when they have completed the topic. On the other hand,
a question such as, "Illustrate how the Monroe Doctrine might be
involved in a Russian-American incident," is likely to generate
good responses from students.
Balance the difficulty of test items
A
professor of business administration distributes test items as follows:
about 25% are reasonably easy questions that nearly everyone should
get correct. About 50% of the questions require a little more sophistication
but should be able to be answered by students who have kept up with
the course material. About 25% of the items are quite challenging and
generally will be answered correctly only by the top 5-10% of the class.
Include an extra credit problem to write
a question
Including
an "extra credit" question on your midterms and final exams
which asks the students to write an exam question rather than an exam
answer. This technique helps establish a good rapport with students,
gives you additional information on their sense of what is important
in the course, and can become an excellent source of possible future
exam, quiz, or discussion questions for the course.
Hand out study and review questions before
the exam
Handing
out study and review questions before the midterm and final. A social
science professor hands out a list of 20-25 possible essay exam questions,
from which the actual exam questions will be selected. "I find
this greatly aids the students' review of the course," he says.
"If they prepare to answer each question, they will have done a
major review and there is no reason they should not do exceptionally
well in the exam
Hold review sessions before the exam
Holding
review sessions both before the midterm and the final exam. Many excellent
teachers hold reviews in all of their undergraduate courses, but it
is especially important in lower-division courses where many students
are still unsure about the performance levels expected of them.
Permit students to bring in one page of
notes
Several
faculty members have found it useful to allow students to take an 8
1/2 x 11 sheet of notes or index cards into the midterm or final examinations.
This strategy decreases students' inevitable anxiety about having to
memorize formulas, and the preparation of these crib sheets are thought
to help the students focus their studying. Restricting them to one page
of notes forces them to synthesize the most important aspects of the
course.
Give two or more midterms and have the
first one early
Giving
two or more midterms and schedule the first one at the end of the first
two or three weeks of class. A professor of physics makes a point of
giving a midterm early enough in the course so that students who are
having difficulty can drop the class without penalty.
Distribute sample answers to past exams
A
political science professor who does this tells the students that one
of the five answers received an "A," one a "B,"
and so on. "Students are asked to decide which response received
which grade," he explains. Their guesses are tallied on the board
and compared with the actual grade each response received. I then ask
students why they gave an `A' to what was actually a `C' response, or
a `D' to a `B' response. Finally, I explain what I am looking for in
a response to an essay exam and why I assigned each sample response
the grade I did.
Give more quizzes than count
Several
faculty members, in grappling with the problems of test-giving, have
decided that it is best not to offer make-up exams. "I give weekly
quizzes," says a professor in forestry, "but only 14 of the
15 count. This means that students can either `miss' one quiz or have
their lowest score dropped."
Test Construction and Assessment
Do
you know how to assess student learning in ways that systematically
address different kinds of learning and is connected to future performance?
Testing
and Assessment Issues (PDF file)
Constructing
tests is a serious concern of instructors and an important part of most
courses. In this chapter we present the types of tests that are typically
used in university settings. We provide general tips about testing,
including how to plan a test and how to write test items. In the final
section, ways of dealing with cheating are discussed.
Testing
Every
effort must be made to prepare students for examinations. This process
starts by informing students at the beginning of the class of the testing
procedure, when tests will be given, and the criteria upon which they
will be evaluated.
Choosing a Test Method
There
are some methods and explanations about the advantages and disadvantages
the kinds of tests, such as Essay, Multiple Choice, Recall, True/False,
and so on have.
Grading Papers
The
following remarks are intended to give you a sense of criteria for grading
papers. Note that four topics recur: thesis, use of evidence, design
(organization), and basic writing skills (grammar, mechanics, spelling).
In courses with multiple graders or teaching fellows, it is essential
that a uniform grading standard be discussed and adapted by those grading
students' work.
Designing Tests To Maximize Learning
It’s
the middle of December. A colleague of yours who teaches mechanics has
just gotten the tabulations of his end-of-course student evaluations
and he’s steaming!
Test Construction
One
of the important tasks of any instructor is developing and implementing
tests to assess students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These assessments
are typically done early in a course and at the end so that some idea
of students’ progress can be determined by examining the change in scores.
Test Item Analysis
After
a multiple choice exam is administered, it is often useful to examine
each item and the responses students marked in order to eliminate or
improve those items that did not work well and to keep those items that
did. To do this analysis some useful statistics, the Difficulty Index
and the Discrimination Index, can be computed.
Test Scoring
CDM
Test Services provides scoring and analysis of exams for the UASOM.
Scantron sheets for several types of multiple choice exams are available.
