Re: MC vs Written Exam Scores

From: Bill Goffe (goffe@oswego.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 18:12:00 CDT

  • Next message: Bill Goffe: "Re: MC vs Written Exam Scores"

    Steve said:

    > I often find higher scores on the written components, on average. I chalk
    > it up to two things. First, I am less cruel, cold and calculating when
    > grading written work than in MC. In MC the question is either right or
    > wrong, no gray areas. And second, the scales of our grading often
    > differ. On any given question in a MC exam the choices are 0% or 100% and
    > we depend on the aggregation (of the 0s and 1s) to match against some
    > scale. However, I would profer that most of us have a theoretical minimum
    > grade on each individual question in a written exam, such as, the worst
    > answer "where the student has tried" is a 6 of 10 or a 5 or even a 4, but
    > not zero.

    I agree -- this is certainly part of it the reason for the differences
    between the different types of results.
     
    > I would make a pitch here for a grading rubric which will help get around
    > this to some degree. A set of grading rubrics can be found at this
    > excellent website: http://www.flaguide.org/cat/rubrics/rubrics7.htm

    Very interesting -- seems to be a variation on being clear on what we
    expect (which we hardly ever do). But, I'm not clear on how to use it in a
    large class.

             - Bill

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