Some starting questions:
Are we (or some of us) able to agree on some MC examination questions for some or all of first year chemistry?
Is first year chemistry common in terms of content and level?
Can organic chemistry be properly examined (including chemical literacy) through MC?
For later year units, are there common topics where we could share examination questions? An example from me might be the 18 electron rule for organometallic compounds, or a question about hemoglobin for bioinorganic chemistry.
If we do this, are we going to share our students' results (confidentially among ourselves)?
The Chemistry Discipline Network is an open community of Chemistry academics from around Australia.
dspagnoli
Thu, 06/21/2012 - 1:28pm
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Hi Madeleine and others in
Hi Madeleine and others in the group,
I am completely in exam mode at the moment because of four days solid marking!! This is just a bit of a brain dump so please excuse the lack of grammar or link between questions/thoughts.
Do we have any data present at the moment, from the mapping excerise to show how many universities provide a MC exam or an MC + short answer exam for first year chemistry final examinations?
A thought on the sharing of results, again I would have to check with my HoD, but we could share general trends on the results of certain questions or subject matter.
Another thought I have had. Is this subgroup trying to standardise the type of questions we ask or the subjects that we ask questions on?
And also does this group hope to improve learning outcomes by standardising exam questions? So maybe the question that could be asked, but might not be relevent for this forum, what is the purpose of exams? To list students grades in order? Or to provide a mechanism for improving in teaching methods based on the outcomes of the grades?
Madeleine Schultz
Thu, 06/21/2012 - 6:47pm
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food for thought
Thanks Dino for getting the ball rolling. As far as the mapping exercise, we only asked what percentage of their total mark is from MC. This does not tell us whether the final exam is MC only. We could askk that question in the next round of mapping but that won't be for a couple of years, or we could just poll internally. Here at QUT, we just introduced a mixed format exam last year in two of our four first year units, but with staffing changes that may or may not continue!
For me, the exercise of reviewing those exams is what leads to the interest in having a pool of shared MC (and nonMC!) questions. This is because many of the questions asked by my colleagues (and me in my less-enlightened days) are basically crap. Have a look at Derek Cheung and Bob Bucat's short and sweet paper here:
http://www3.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/chemistry/files/constructMC.pdf
Particularly for organic, the questions at QUT are very often the complex type (eg which 3 of the following 7 compounds are aromatic? then choices like I, II and IV; I III and V; none of them; etc). These are unnecessarily confusing and do NOT reward students who understand. Which brings me to: for me the purpose of a final exam is two fold - to give the student an opportunity to demonstrate that they have learnt something, and to give me some idea of who should progress and how they are going.
When i reviewed the first year exams here, I found not only really bad questions, but a tendency for new staff to reuse the structure of the questions and only modify the chemical compounds. This means that bad question types are perpetuated and no-one thinks too hard about it.
I want some shared questions for the following reasons:
- so we can make sure they are GOOD (in the Cheung and Bucat terms)
- so I can say to my colleagues that we have to keep our content at whatever level (eg colligative properties were removed entirely from first year) because that is the Australian standard
- to save me writing new questions.
Other thoughts?
Madeleine Schultz
Thu, 10/25/2012 - 6:32pm
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Hi again,
Hi again,
I would like to discuss what people think is a good mix of questions in an exam (whether multiple choice or not). What proportion of questions should involve calculations? Reproducing facts? Applying formulae? How can we access higher order learning? Does it depend on the content being examined?
If we look at our current exams, how do they measure up to this ideal?
I look forward to your thoughts.
Madeleine