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Considerations for Online Exams
Exam Design
Online exams can be crafted with the expectation that students will consult their notes, class resources, and the internet. To some extent, considering online exams requires instructors to evaluate what exactly she or he is accomplishing with exams. An instructor must be comfortable with the fact that even prepared students will take advantage of sources ready at hand to look up one or two things, or just glance at their notes to better support an essay argument. Students may learn a thing or two this way while taking the exam, but then have met course learning objectives before submitting the exam. Moreover, collaboration between students may not be a problem in itself, so long as students do not rely on it to take the place of engaging the course content. (After all, you may not oppose, and may even encourage, students working together while studying for an upcoming in-class exam). That said, this does not make online exams precisely the same as a traditional “open-book” exams, because technology can create exam circumstances not previously possible.
For example, each section of an exam, including a set of MCQs, may be time-limited. Upon entering the exam, students start a clock that runs down as they work to complete questions. This is not radically different from traditional in-class exams, that are typically limited in time to a class period. When crafting exam sections and their time limits, a good question to ask is: what time limit would allow a properly prepared student a comfortable margin to answer all the questions, allowing time for some consideration, but without undue stress from the clock? For MCQs, a good starting ratio is about one minute per question, but depending on the nature of the question or content, this may vary.
For an online exam, a large portion of MCQs should be constructed so that they are not easily answered with a quick web search. Students who did not prepare for the exam (as they would for a traditional, in-class exam) find the internet no help, because they’ll burn through the time allowed looking up answers before getting enough answered for a passing grade. And if these questions are in the same time bracket with other types (say, a total of 40 minutes for 10 multiple choice and several essays, long or short), they must carefully weigh how much time to struggle over any set of questions altogether. Even if some MCQs might be answered quickly with a web search, this may not be clear to students, and may not yield enough points for a passing grade.
Using most Learning Management System exam tools (including Desire2Learn’s) questions may be delivered at random from a larger bank of questions, so that no two students get the same set of questions, in anything like the same order. Even answer choices within questions might be randomized. Randomized question distribution makes collaboration difficult for students who failed to prepare beforehandMCQs should be considered within the context of good online exam design. MCQs are best employed when delivered to students from a larger question bank, at random, with perhaps answer choices randomized within each question.
Online Multiple Choice Questions
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