Tag: exams

Teaching Tip: Simple Strategies to Reduce Cheating on Online Exams

The end of the academic term, of course, brings final exams and cumulative assessments to test students’ knowledge of OM course materials. With so many college students taking online courses (and that number expeditiously increasing) so will the need for administering exams within the online learning environment, writes Faculty Focus (May 11, 2020). Even without expensive virtual proctoring tools, there are many ways that instructors can leverage the inherent features within their institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) and within MyOMLab to decrease cheating during online examinations. Here are 6 ways to do so:

  1. Use varied question types. Refrain from having an exam with all multiple choice or true and false questions. Our MyOMLab’s algorithmic problems are a perfect complement to these questions.
  2. Creatively remind students of academic integrity policies. Create and post a video explaining the guidelines for the online exam and review the institution’s academic integrity policy and consequences that are listed in the course syllabus.
  3. Require students to sign an academic integrity contract. After reviewing the academic integrity reminder video, have students electronically sign a contract that lists what the university considers cheating.
  4. Restrict testing window. Similar to how on-campus final exams have a designated testing slot for each course, create the same online. Have every student start the exam around the same time and limit how long each student will have to take the exam. If you have students in different time zones, consider offering three sets of tests, at 3 different start times.
  5. Change test question sequence. In the test settings, have the order of test questions be different for each exam along with the order of answer choices for each test question.
  6. Delay score availability. Set a later date after the testing window ends for students to see their score and feedback and do not make the score available for immediate view after test completion. This way, one student who finishes early cannot see their score and then advise students who have not completed the test yet.

These are just a few ideas. Care to share your own tips with a comment below?

Teaching Tip: Cumulative Exams in Your OM Course

test“The evidence that students retain content longer and can apply it better when exams and finals are cumulative is compelling,” reports Faculty Focus (March 18, 2015). Will your students yell and scream? Yes, but for the very reason we should be using them: they force regular, repeated encounters with the content. It’s those multiple interactions with the material that move learning from memorization to understanding. Students object because they don’t know how to study for long-term retention. Here are 3 suggestions:

1. Use previous or potential test questions.

Display a question at the beginning of the session. “Here’s a test question I’ve asked previously about TQM. How would you answer it?” Give them time to talk with each other. Have them look in their notes.

Have students create a possible test question. “This material on project crashing is fair game for the exam. What might a test question about it be?” Identify those that are good. If one those student questions ends up on the test, that pretty much guarantees that students will take this activity seriously.

2. Make a habit of asking questions about previous material. A few guidelines:

Do not answer the questions yourself. Give a hint if needed.

Ignore their looks of confusion and claims that they don’t have a clue.

No response? Tell them, “that’s the question we’ll start with in our next class and if you don’t have an answer then, it’s a potential exam question for sure.”

3. Have students do short reviews of previous material.

In class today, say, “Let’s all look at our notes from last week. Take 2 minutes to underline 3 things in your notes that you’re going to need to review for the exam.”

Late in the semester, say, “Take 3 minutes to review your notes from a month ago. Do you have anything in those notes that doesn’t make sense to you now?” Encourage them to write more in their notes if they need to.

Students who regularly encounter previous content in your OM course, find studying for cumulative exams easier

 

Teaching Tip: How Hard is it to Make a Good Exam?

One of our biggest responsibilities as OM instructors is making up exams and homework assignments. Do you think your students are too test- and answer-oriented?  When preparing for quizzes and tests, do they focus on memorizing formulas and answers, without really thinking about the questions? Does someone ask during each lecture: “Will this be on the exam?”

To cultivate interest in questions, some instructors consider having students write exam questions. Could this be a way to help teachers generate new test questions?  “Don’t count on it,” writes Professor Maryellen Weimer, author of the Teaching Professor Newsletter. “Writing good test questions — ones that make students think, ones that really ascertain whether they understand the material — is hard work. Given that many students are not particularly strong writers to begin with, they won’t write good test questions automatically. In fact, you probably shouldn’t try the strategy if you aren’t willing to devote some time to developing test writing skills.”

The approach that Jay and I take is to deal with this issue for you. We have created an on-line Test Bank of close to 3,000 AACSB-coded Multiple-choice, True-False, fill-in-the blank, and math-oriented questions to accompany the text. And we have tested and retested these questions to make sure each is crystal clear. In addition, we now have now over 700 homework problems in the text programmed into MyOMLab, our assessment software. Most of these are available in both “bookmatch” (exactly the same as in the text) and “algorithmic” versions (which means that each student solves the same problem, but with a unique data set). If any issue regarding clarity in any one of our resources arises, we will fix the problem on-line the same day.

Making and grading homework and quizzes is probably the least fun part of teaching OM. Our testbanks are there to help you save time for the rest of your teaching tasks.