Brief description

This practical example presents a way to combine a longer course with a multiple-choice exam. During the course, the students have access to a large pool of questions, where they can test their knowledge. These questions also include the exam questions, which results in a greater academic benefit for the students.

The teacher’s motivation

The purpose of the exam is to bring all students to the same ‘level’ in a wide range of historical topics and to train their analogue and digital skills in surveying and prioritising topics.

Previously, this took the form of an oral examination but has now been converted to a MCQ exam that aims to:

• Test the students in wide-ranging factual knowledge instead of testing them in just one topic from the curriculum. This helps to:
• Balance the exam experience among students, as everyone is examined in the same material. There has previously been a widespread perception that you can either be lucky or unlucky depending on the topic you draw.
• Make the type of examination less stressful, as the oral examination has previously caused a lot of guesswork and nervousness among the students.
• Make the type of examination less unpredictable for the students, as they have a chance to practice all the possible questions throughout the semester.

Outcome of the activity

• A larger number of students get more out of teaching and examination. Especially the students at an intermediate level improve.
• These students are particularly successful in broadening their knowledge, which is a course goal.
• The teaching group’s opinion of MCQ exams has somewhat changed. From there being a certain amount of scepticism, there is now an experience of being able to create MCQ exams at a high academic level that require more from the students in terms of historical overview and competencies.
• There is cohesion between curriculum and exam questions, since all involved teachers have to quality check the questions in the exam set and update them in case of new editions of the textbook. Responsibility and workload are divided between more teachers.

Challenges

• Developing material for this type of examination is a long-term investment. In the long run, it will save time for members of the academic staff and the administration. But if we only measure the start-up phase, this type of examination requires more time than the benefit justifies.
• Student instructors need certain IT competencies as they must be able to assist and inspire the students to actually practice the questions in Brightspace.
• The practice takes in place in Brightspace, which has a different user interface than WISEflow. Ideally, the questions should be available in one system that the students could use both during the semester and for the exam.
• It is not clear which system can be used for the exam, and it has not been decided whether we can continue using WISEflow.

Useful tips

• Teachers who embark on designing digital exams should insist on prioritising one single system that can be used for both practice and examination, while being directly linked to the assessment system. Otherwise, they may spend too much time on inadequate solutions and twice as much work across systems.