Minitab Mini-testing

A lecturer in Biology teaches students to use the statistical software package 'Minitab'. He is using a Blackboard quiz a mechanism to mark their work in the computer lab and give them some feedback.

Students download a Minitab file from Blackboard, carry out tests on the data it contains and enter answers into the Blackboard quiz which marks their answers.

For the first iteration a manual check of the answers and rescoring has been necessary, but the answers can be improved upon in future iterations. Once the scores have been checked, the marks, and even the feedback be released to students. The Minitab file can be amended and the quiz slightly adjusted to produce a new test.

The final exam will include an extended version of this exercise.

Online exams

The Newcastle Dental School are building banks of tagged multiple choice questions in Blackboard. This will allow them to build exams by searching the question database by categories such as difficulty level and topic. They can, for example, find 3 easy questions on tooth morphology, and then two harder questions. They can then move on to the next topic and add questions until they have an exam that covers the curriculum with a balance of questions. They will use post-exam reports to iteratively refine questions and their categorisation to improve the database each year.

In addition to this work on MCQ questions, they are considering building banks of short answer (typed answer) questions. Whilst they cannot be marked automatically, they can be tagged and reused. Blackboard now allows you to anonymously mark by question. In other words, they can mark question 1 for each student, before marking question 2 for each student and so on. This marking can be split so that for example ,individual lecturers only mark the questions they set. Together with the improved legibility of typed answers, this may make the onscreen marking worthwhile.


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