That was the sweet spot! Check out my grade distribution from my last exam!

The Intro:

If you are following this blog you know that my first few attempts of online tests this summer didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. Here is what I did so far:

1st exam, I gave the students an exam and had them make a video of their solutions. This worked wonderful in my upper level class, but not too well in my physics I class. I wrote about that here.

2nd exam: I dropped the video part. They worked in groups – I didn’t try to control how they took the exam. This created an intense conversation between myself and my students. You can read about that here. From the instructor’s point of view it wasn’t workiong.

Now:

The 3rd exam: I made my exam into a moodle quiz. I then took traditional physics problems and rewrote them so they couldn’t be googled. Then I changed all the numbers. Then I put in a number of questions into moodle, many more than I need for a single exam (about five-to-eight times the number of questions). Finally I had moodle generate a random test for each student. I scrambled numbers for each of the questions.

There were problems that were difficult multi step problems (students attached pictures of their work) and a number of a straightforward conceptual problems (multiple choice and input numerical value). Moodle’s test bank was wonderful! You can group questions together and have moodle choose a random question from each of these groups.

Grading this was a nightmare. There was some small win in that Moodle autograded the conceptual questions. But of course, I had the students email their work so they could get partial credit so I had still had to grade everyone’s work. Moodle’s grading tool is maddening! By the end, I was exhausted.

I will be honest with you about half way through preparing for this exam I opened up Visual Studio and started building my own App (go go C#). I didn’t think Moodle would be flexible enough for what I wanted. But it worked out okay in the end.

WTH

My general exam strategy is called the “BIG SQUEEZE”. I start off at the beginning semester giving students lots of flexibility (time, group work, etc) and then squeeze them as the semester goes on – pushing them harder as we move toward the final.

But the jump was too much! Students went from getting an average of a 90 to an average of a 58. Some student’s even dipped below. I had one student upset that he “failed” the exam because he got in the 70s. I tried to tell him that was a high B+, almost an A-. My “keep working hard” statement didn’t work.

And then there were students who got below 60% and weren’t prepared for it. In a normal face-to-face class, I spend weeks preparing students for their scores on exams. Preparing them for what to expect. I tried to do it here but there just wasn’t enough time and the expectation was that there would be a 92% average (The high was a 91.). In this aspect I failed my students. I feel terrible.

But I now know how to make a physics I and physics II exam in an online environment.