the problem with any exam ... given in any format ... is the extent to which you can INFER what the examinee knows or does not know from their responses
in the case of recognition tests ... where precreated answers are given and you make a choice ... it is very difficult to infer anything BUT what the choice was ... if that choice was keyed as correct and the examinee selected it ... first, you have to give credit for it and second ... about all you can do is to assume the person understood the item (which may or may not be correct of course) in open ended problems ... where the person has to SUPPLY responses ... the instructor is in somewhat of a better position to assess knowledge ... assuming that the directions to the examinee were clear as to what he/she was to put down ... however, even here, there are limits what if i ask the ? ... what is the mean of 34, 56, 29, and 32? and i leave space ... and your directions say to round to 1 place and he/she puts 37.8 in the space ... sort of looks like he/she knew what to do (but you can't be positive since, he/she could have added up slightly incorrectly but still when rounding, it = 37.8) but, what if they put 37.2 .... or 38.1 ... what do you make of it? now, if WORK were required to be displayed, you might be able to see what happened and then "grade" accordingly ... if the process was totally messed up ... no credit but, if you see they added up the 4 values incorrectly but, had the right process ... almost full credit but, not total ... they DID make some mistake what if they added correctly but for some unknown reason ... had in the back of their mind n-1 and divided by 3? is that = to a mistake of dividing by 4 but having added up the 4 numbers wrong? now, in a mc format ... we might have 37.8 as one of the answers but, other options that incorporate some adding up the numbers INcorrectly but dividing by 4, adding up the 4 numbers correctly but dividing by n-1, etc. so, if they don't select the keyed answer ... BUT, they select some other option ... then you MIGHT be able to "infer" some partial knowledge just as if you see an incorrect answer and see that they divided by 3 rather than 4 BUT YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL DOING THIS ... since you still see no worked out evidence of where they might have gone astray generally, open ended ? that require physical responses to be made off a better opportunity to "gauge" what the examinee knows but ... again ... there are real limits the bottom line here is that no matter how you examine the student, unless you do lots of followup probing ... you will be in a difficult position to know very precisely what the person knows or does not know an exam is a very limited sample of behavior from which you are not in a very good position to extend your "inference" about what the examinee was "really thinking" when faced with that item or test to attempt to infer more is playing a sheer folly game _________________________________________________________ dennis roberts, educational psychology, penn state university 208 cedar, AC 8148632401, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
