Multiple choice question (MCQ) exams are so easy to grade, but so much work to write.
About the Question Packs
Not just for History anymore! I am thrilled to announce that a new Question Pack for OpenStax American Government 3e just launched! OpenStax Introduction to Sociology 3e will be available by the end of the year and Question Packs for many OpenStax Social Science and Business titles will be coming next year!
The Question Packs are a direct product of my own years of experience as a lecturer teaching traditional, online, and hybrid American history classes at private and public universities and community colleges. The question banks attempt to solve several problems and roadblocks with the easy and efficient creation of multiple choice exams which I encountered along the way.
Multiple Choice Exams: Instructor Friends or Foes?!
There are many valid criticisms of multiple choice exams, but they are valuable tools for freeway-flying adjuncts and other college instructors with large course loads and limited time for writing high quality exams.
MC exams are easy to administer and easy to grade. Well-written quizzes and exams furnish useful snapshots of student understanding of the course materials. They may pinpoint concepts which a significant percentage of learners are finding problematic and enable the instructor to provide additional clarification and modify the lessons for the future.
The real challenge is to write multiple choice questions (MCQs) which move beyond simplistic rote recall to probe student understanding of foundational concepts and crucial developments.
But if you have tried to write MCQ exams yourself, you know that this process can be surprisingly difficult and time-consuming. Thus, many instructors try to obtain pre-written questions, called test banks, from the publisher of the textbook they are using.
Publisher test banks sound so easy to use, but they can present several frustrating challenges to actual, successful deployment in your U.S. History course.
Textbook Test Bank Frustrations
Publisher test banks usually need significant modification and “clean up.” All of the MCQs may be layered with many pieces of extraneous information and require extensive editing before they can be used to create paper exams.
The test bank questions may be badly constructed, poorly written, and confusing. Student confusion and complaints lead to more time and work to revise, rewrite, or create completely new assessment materials.
The Test Bank Files May Require Time-Consuming Editing
No Easy Way to Import Test Bank Questions Into Your Online Courses
None of the publisher test banks which I attempted to use provided any digital files to directly and conveniently import all of the publishers’ MCQs into Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle. So the instructor is still tasked with manually entering all the multiple choice questions and answers into the LMS before online quizzes and exams can be automatically generated.
Access Denied!
In order to help my students save on textbook costs, I adopted the excellent, free U.S. History textbook published by OpenStax, which also included a test bank. However, I immediately ran into another unexpected and annoying setback. I was denied access to the publisher test bank because I had just started a new job and my name was not yet on an “official” web page of my teaching institution(s).
Being the Change I Wanted to See
At that point, with a new semester looming, I decided to write my own questions for every chapter of the OpenStax U.S. History textbook. I manually entered all of the multiple choice questions and answers in Blackboard, then saved them as files I could re-use the following semesters.
It occurred to me that other instructors, especially adjuncts, might find those OpenStax US History question bank files useful for their own courses. I added Word files and files for Canvas and Moodle and all in a clean and usable format that makes it fast and easy to create either paper or online quizzes and exams.
Being the Change You Want to See
I created similar Question Packs for Give Me Liberty! and The American Journey.
After one of my customers mentioned that she would like to use a Question Pack for the OpenStax American Government textbook, I created one.
The newest Question Pack, coming soon, will be for the OpenStax Sociology textbook.
If there is a social sciences or humanities textbook that YOU would like to see a Question Pack for, please let me know!
Please don’t hesitate to reach out any time if you have any comments, questions, or concerns.
Thanks for stopping by today!
Helen
