Location
Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland
Event Website
https://event.ceri2020.exordo.com/
Start Date
27-8-2020 3:00 PM
End Date
27-8-2020 4:15 PM
Description
With pressure to increase student numbers on academic courses worldwide, the trends in exam marks distribution for subject modules become more acute, with more distinct pattern characteristics reflecting student choices, topic and exam question difficulty, and lecturer marking severity, refinement and consistency. The practice of representing the overall exam results in a module through histograms enables normality, skewness and randomness to be identified, interrogated and understood. However, when dealing with large numbers of exam candidates (of the order of 1000 or more), an investigation of the averages and histograms for individual exam questions can further reveal refined explanations for poor or unusual performance. This paper compares the outcomes of a typical circa 250 1st year engineering class size with similar modules in another jurisdiction with over 2400 students in order to develop a deeper understanding of exam dynamics amongst students sitting and faculty marking those papers. It can involve many ten thousands of items of data in a histogram for just one module, in which trends are not random and have clear causes, intended or accidental. It emerges that at least four different question patterns may exist from a range of modules types. These indicate the importance of examiners having an appreciation, when delivering lectures, planning exam papers and question structure, of the different factors which give rise to unusual examination outcome trends which, in some cases, can be unduly unfair on exam candidates.
Recommended Citation
West, Roger P. and Wride, Michael A., "Examining Large Student Cohorts - A Question of Questions" (2020). Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020. 2.
https://sword.cit.ie/ceri/2020/15/2
Included in
Civil Engineering Commons, Construction Engineering and Management Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons, Geotechnical Engineering Commons, Hydraulic Engineering Commons, Structural Engineering Commons, Transportation Engineering Commons
Examining Large Student Cohorts - A Question of Questions
Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland
With pressure to increase student numbers on academic courses worldwide, the trends in exam marks distribution for subject modules become more acute, with more distinct pattern characteristics reflecting student choices, topic and exam question difficulty, and lecturer marking severity, refinement and consistency. The practice of representing the overall exam results in a module through histograms enables normality, skewness and randomness to be identified, interrogated and understood. However, when dealing with large numbers of exam candidates (of the order of 1000 or more), an investigation of the averages and histograms for individual exam questions can further reveal refined explanations for poor or unusual performance. This paper compares the outcomes of a typical circa 250 1st year engineering class size with similar modules in another jurisdiction with over 2400 students in order to develop a deeper understanding of exam dynamics amongst students sitting and faculty marking those papers. It can involve many ten thousands of items of data in a histogram for just one module, in which trends are not random and have clear causes, intended or accidental. It emerges that at least four different question patterns may exist from a range of modules types. These indicate the importance of examiners having an appreciation, when delivering lectures, planning exam papers and question structure, of the different factors which give rise to unusual examination outcome trends which, in some cases, can be unduly unfair on exam candidates.
https://sword.cit.ie/ceri/2020/15/2
