{"id":2201,"date":"2016-08-29T20:23:09","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T10:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sydney.edu.au\/education-portfolio\/ei\/teaching@sydney\/?p=2201"},"modified":"2016-08-30T22:10:05","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T12:10:05","slug":"53-powerful-ideas-teachers-know-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/53-powerful-ideas-teachers-know-4\/","title":{"rendered":"53 Powerful Ideas All Teachers Should Know About – Configuring Exams"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Idea 10 of Graham Gibbs’ blog, he discusses the idea\u00a0that “Students\u2019 marks are often determined as much by the way assessment is configured as by how much students have learnt<\/a>“. In exam paper setting season, it is good practice to review the performance of last year’s\u00a0students on the previous\u00a0exam. If students did more poorly than expected, we\u00a0often think\u00a0about\u00a0how hard the students worked or even the attendance at lectures. If students did better than expected, we may\u00a0look at the interventions or changes that were made to the teaching. However, Gibbs argues that it is the\u00a0assessment regime itself that may be the most important factor in determining how the class as a whole performs. When considering the design of this year’s\u00a0exam, it is worth considering how it is made up as well as its content.<\/p>\n

For an exam, students have to study all topics in some depth unless they are willing to take risks on likely topics. Their study time is likely to be shared\u00a0across all topics, so that each topic will get less time than it would for\u00a0a piece of coursework. Exam marks reflect this lower amount of\u00a0time\u00a0spent on\u00a0each topic. To reduce any bias in\u00a0the difficulty, it is often a good idea to set exams without too wide a choice of questions.\u00a0An\u00a0exam\u00a0which\u00a0randomly samples the entire curriculum and is purposefully designed\u00a0to assess core and advanced understanding will\u00a0generally give\u00a0a reasonable indication of what students have learnt across the whole curriculum. However, exam marks are usually lower than marks for coursework for precisely this reason.<\/p>\n

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK’s most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular ’53 Interesting Ideas’ books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs’ new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About<\/a> offers a research summary of key issues.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Idea 10 of Graham Gibbs’ blog, he discusses the idea\u00a0that “Students\u2019 marks are often determined as much by the way assessment is configured…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":2208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,57],"tags":[104,105,84,102,103],"coauthors":[462],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-teaching-research","category-teaching-tips","tag-feedback","tag-marking","tag-motivation","tag-peer-assessment","tag-self-assessment","post-item","post-even"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2232,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions\/2232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}