Take the Pain Out of Testing
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL
Everyone hates tests. For students, test anxiety has long been on the rise. Faculty dread both writing exams and the tedium of grading them. Three of your VU colleagues have found a way to take some of the pain out of testing.
Musa Pinar (Business) draws on question pools to create his exams. Mandy Brobst-Renaud (Theology) uses alternative forms of assessment that allow her students to exhibit their learning and also play to their strengths. And Lanie Steinwart (Communication & Visual Arts) saves time by creating online tests that can be graded automatically by Blackboard.
Read on to learn more about your colleagues’ ideas for making tests less of a chore for both you and your students.
Musa Pinar: Using Question Pools for Quizzes and Exams
Musa has been using question pools for exams during all of his teaching career. It saves him time from routine grading so that he can concentrate on more challenging and interactive activities. These pools offer questions that are related to understanding, comprehension, and application of concepts and theories covered in the courses.
He has always gotten his question pools for free directly from the textbook publisher. The publisher provides the questions for a given chapter as both a word document and a file to be used for Blackboard. Musa can easily download the file and copy into Blackboard. From there he can select the questions he wants to use.
Musa uses these online tests primarily for quizzes to be sure students that are keeping up with the reading. He finds that regular quizzes ensure that students do not wait until exam time to do the reading.
His quizzes consist of 15 questions for each chapter. He selects them from the 70-80 provided in the question pool. He chooses multiple choice or true/false questions that reflect what he has covered in class. Blackboard automatically grades the exams and puts the grades into BB’s grade book. You can also opt to add essay questions, which would need to be graded manually.
At first, Musa allowed students to take online exams at home on the exam day. But he found some evidence that students might be sharing the exam questions and/or answers. So to remove the temptation, he now holds his quizzes during class time with students taking them on laptops or tablets. He gives them 10 minutes to answer the 15 questions.
Musa cautions that you must be careful how you set up exams in Blackboard. He found out from one student that students had access to all the exam questions after the exam was completed. So Musa reset the exam parameters with help from Gina Rue so that students could only view one question at a time. Gina is part of the Instructional Technology, Design, and Assessment team, and they are available for assistance through the IT Help Desk: helpdesk@valpo.edu.
Online exams are only one of many forms of evaluation that Musa uses. Since he knows that some students are not good exam takers, he provides many other opportunities for them to show him that they understand the concepts covered in the class, including class projects and presentations.
Lanie Steinwart: Letting Blackboard do Some of your Grading
Lanie began using Blackboard for tests eight years ago. She says that she did it for a self-serving purpose: to save herself time grading exams.
She found that setting up an exam in Blackboard for the first time is labor intensive. But you can, as Musa does, begin with questions from a question pool. Right now Lanie is using a textbook that does not provide them. But question pools will definitely be a factor in what textbook she selects in the future.
She can use her online exams again and again, just rotating, changing, or adding to the questions. She uses mostly multiple choice and true/false questions. She can also modify each question to better fit what she has covered in class.
Like Musa, Lanie has her students take online exams in the classroom via their laptops or tablets. She warns students not to try to use their cell phone, as Blackboard is not set up for that.
Lanie appreciates that Blackboard gives her the option to grade multiple exams by question. Seeing all the students’ answers to the same question at one time can reveal trends. She can see whether she erred in her wording of the question or whether there is a pattern of shared answers. Blackboard also offers the option to randomly present the same questions so that one student’s question number 1 is another student’s question number 9. Lanie does not use this option, but she can see how it could help prevent cheating.
For her final exam Lanie uses all short answer questions. Students take the exam via Blackboard, but she grades these manually. She does this because for her final assessment she wants to hear the student’s own voice and their own thinking. To prepare for the final, she gives students access to the short answer questions on their previous tests, since some of the same concepts will reappear on the final exam. They can view both their own answers and the correct answers. For this reason she makes sure to change up the tests for the next semester.
Lanie notes that online testing is not foolproof. There is always a chance of a Blackboard hiccup for an individual student. For example, she has had a student press the “save” button instead of “submit” after completing a test, resulting in Lanie only seeing “test in progress” in the grade center rather than the score. Something like this happens at least once per test, but the instructor can always submit the test for them.
Overall, Lanie is very pleased with using online tests in Blackboard. Not only does it save her grading time, but students love the immediate feedback of getting their grade more quickly.
Mandy Brobst-Renaud: Unleashing Student Creativity and Curiosity in Projects and Exams
During the pandemic, Mandy realized that traditional exams no longer worked for her. She found that students could easily google responses to exam questions. As she began to rethink exams, she realized that she wanted her summative (end of unit) assessments to better match her formative (in class) assessments. For her, the summative assessments, i.e. exams, need to reinforce the growth mindset that she promotes in class.
Unlike traditional exams, real life tasks are rarely a one-time event. Instead, tasks, projects, and papers get revised, critiqued, revised again. So Mandy is constantly asking herself how can she make her assessments work more like that. That is why, for her major projects, she follows a process format: helping students move from curiosity to questions, then finally to a thesis.
At first students hated this process, because they were unsure when they had done enough. Mandy does provide rubrics, but she also wants her students to experience that uncertainty, because in the real world it is up to you to decide when you have done enough.
Mandy also offers her students different pathways to demonstrate their learning. They can opt for a traditional paper or an exam. But they can also design a world in Minecraft, create a podcast, build an online escape room, or even put together a playlist of songs that connect to the concepts from the assigned reading.
She finds that when students can choose the mode, they spend more time on the assignment and are more invested in the material. They find ways to bring their own strengths to bear on the material and even ask better questions in class.
For her final exam, Mandy has 3-6 essay questions, some of which are academic and others creative. She might, for example, ask them to write an account of an event in the Gospels from the perspective of a specific person who witnessed it.
Mandy thinks that her next challenge will be to learn how to capitalize on her students’ academic gains. She is constantly looking for ways to push them to the next level.