testing – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: Assessing Your OM Students and Academic Integrity

Academic integrity has long been a necessary consideration for educators, but last year’s abrupt move to online learning intensified questions about just how much students may take advantage of outside help. Whether in person or online, then, what can you do to minimize cheating in the first place? As we near the end of the year, here are some ways you can adjust your assessment approach to better support students and give them the confidence to succeed.

While there will always be a few students who plan to cheat no matter what, many students are driven to do so by fear. So the solution is not to amp up your cheating-detection skills. Instead, Harvard Business Publishing (Dec. 6. 2021) suggests that educators can reduce students’ inclination to cheat in the first place by better engaging them in class and giving them more opportunities to confidently showcase their knowledge. Here are some strategies OM profs can use to reduce academic dishonesty and assess student learning more effectively.

Four ways to adjust exams to discourage cheating:

Give students more assessment opportunities throughout the semester by breaking up larger exams into smaller unit-, chapter-, or topic-specific tests.
Use the Heizer/Render/Munson bank of 2,000+ test questions (and some 400 are algorithmic) and mix them up on your exams—if each student receives a different set of questions, it will be harder to share answers.
Use problems or questions that ask students to explain, analyze, and infer—to prompt unique responses.
Use some of the 850 problems from MyOMLab instead of multiple-choice testing.

Three tips for boosting test-taking confidence:

Provide practice questions so students can learn what their strengths and weaknesses are before the pressure of a real exam.
Help students monitor their own progress by using low-stakes quizzes, or one-minute paper questions immediately following the introduction of new material to give them the practice they need to retrieve and rehearse information.
Offer students the opportunity to self-correct their answers after a quiz rather than directly giving them immediate feedback. This sets the tone that quizzes are learning opportunities.

Our goal is to prepare students to demonstrate and retain knowledge through exams, not heighten their anxiety or increase their proclivity to cheat. So it’s important to consider the purpose that each question serves toward the course objectives. Exams should help students fully understand concepts and analyze ideas on their own.

Teaching Tip: Assessing Students in Your On-Line OM Course

Here we are preparing for final exams for Fall already! If you are teaching an on-line operations management course, Faculty Focus (Dec. 2, 2013) points out that assessments that worked perfectly fine in a face-to-face classroom may need to be tweaked or even replaced for the online version. Why? Because cheating is easier to do (and harder to detect) online. While it’s not clear whether online students do, in fact, cheat more than face-to-face students, the truth is that it is more difficult to monitor who’s taking a test and how they’re taking it online than it is in a classroom. Faculty Focus’ 5 strategies for adapting assessments for online delivery include:

Timed/open book tests. Online, every test is an open book test (except those that are proctored). To minimize read-as-you-go test-taking, reduce the amount of time students have to take the test so that only those students familiar with the material can answer the questions in the time allotted. Alternatively, replace selected response tests (such as multiple choice and T/F) with short-answer or essay questions that require students to apply textbook facts to novel scenarios.
Randomized test questions. Shuffling questions helps reduce the likelihood that 2 students sitting in adjacent library carrels can take the same test together, one answering the “odds” and the other answering the “evens.” Selecting questions randomly from our large 2,000+ question test bank takes this idea one step further, providing each student with a similar (but not identical) assessment.
Frequent low-stakes tests, such as short quizzes or self-check activities worth no more than a few points each, help make cheating more trouble than it’s worth.
Coordinated tests. Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same class may want to coordinate tests so that all students take the same test at the same time. (Staggering tests increases the likelihood that the first students to take the test can pass on question details to their colleagues.)
Proctoring. Requiring students to take proctored exams takes cheating off the table—or, at least, returns it to the same level as a face-to-face class.

Guest Post: Testing and Teaching at Stockton College

Today’s Guest Post comes from Prof. Bill Quain, at Stockton College, NJ. Bill has previously taught at Florida International U. and U. of Central Florida, and held endowed chairs at both.

Testing Is Teaching TooI

A few days ago, Jay and Barry’s OM Blog talked about the importance of testing in OM classes. I, also, have long been an advocate of using tests to teach. Nothing focuses the mind more than when you are going to be asked to prove that you understood it. But, I don’t usually give memorization tests. In fact, most of my tests, even if they are forced choice (multiple choice) are open book exams. I try to make them so thought-provoking that the students know in advance that they must know WHERE the content is located so that they can formulate answers. However, my favorite type of test is problem solving.

I do not take attendance in my classes. To me, THAT is a waste of precious class time. Almost all of my students know their own name, so what can be gained by calling them out? Of course, it does help the professor learn the students’ names, and that is a good thing.

Instead of attendance-taking, I give a lot of quizzes, all unannounced. The students are allowed to miss one or two.

Here is the main difference between my tests and those of other faculty members. My students take each quiz and test as an individual, and then they take it in a group. Each student’s grade is 80% from the individual score, and 20 % from the group’s score. This process helps students learn, and it solves so many class problems.

For example, at the end of the group test, each student knows how they did, and they learned the right answers from their group. In addition, if a group has a problem with a question, I just throw it out – not because it was too difficult, but because if a group cannot figure it out, it was a bad question. The students love this, and it cuts down so much on arguments. My classes are happier, the students learn more, and I get better evaluations. This is a trifecta of good news.

Teaching Tip: The Key to OM Learning–Testing, Testing, Testing

Kevin Watson, at Iowa State U., just sent me a New York Times (Jan.20,2011) article titled “To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test“, based on research that appeared last week in Science. The piece opens: “Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know. It actually helps learn, and works better than a number of other studying methods”.

It turns out that students who are tested on a passage they read have a 50% improvement in recall than those using other techniques. Even getting an answer wrong had positive recall benefits. Experts call the results in Science striking.

The Times adds, “Testing, of course, is a highly charged issue in education, drawing criticism that too much promotes rote learning, swallows valuable time for learning new things, and causes excessive student anxiety”.

I disagree with this criticism. Not only do I like the idea of testing, I am a firm believer in weekly quizzes and even “pre-tests” assigned to students before each class. In this era of mass distractions available to students sitting in class (e-mail, texting, Solitaire), the one item that helps student focus is gathering the knowledge needed for a test.

By sheer coincidence, Prof. Bill Quain, at Stockton College, sent me the same NYT article the same day. When I asked how he kept the students’ attention, he laughed and said the magic words are “this will be on the test”. Even when he shows a You-Tube clip, he tells the class they will be quizzed on it.

How can we help? It turns out that our MyOMLab assessment system, which you can master in a half-hour, may be the cure. You can give pre-tests, quizzes, tests, all on-line. Each takes only 5 minutes to create and the grading is automated. Email anne.fahlgren@pearson.com for an on-line demo, or ask Anne to send a rep to your office for a personal tutorial.