Abstract
The administration of A/B exams usually involves the use of items. Issues arise when the pre-establishment of a question bank is necessary and the inconsistency in the knowledge points to be tested (in the two exams) reduces the exams ‘fairness’. These are critical for a large multi-teacher course wherein the teachers are changed such that the course and examination content are altered every few years. However, a fair test with randomly participating students should still be a guaranteed subject with no item pool. Through data-driven decision-making, this study collected data related to a term test for a compulsory general course for empirical assessments, pre-processed the data and used item response theory to statistically estimate the difficulty, discrimination and lower asymptotic for each item in the two exam papers. Binary goal programing was finally used to analyze and balance the fairness of A/B exams without an item pool. As a result, pairs of associated questions in the two exam papers were optimized in terms of their overall balance in three dimensions (as the goals) through the paired exchanges of items. These exam papers guarantee their consistency (in the tested knowledge points) and also ensure the fairness of the term test (a key psychological factor that motivates continued studies). Such an application is novel as the teacher(s) did not have a pre-set question bank and could formulate the fairest strategy for the A/B exam papers. The model can be employed to address similar teaching practice issues.
Highlights
With regards to data analytics and decision supporting, this study proposed the use of a hybrid model that combined item response theory (IRT) used in statistics and binary goal programing (BGP) used in operational research [3]
The content of A/B exam papers after item exchange (i.e., A’ and B’ exam papers) is fair from the students’ perspective
This is beneficial for teachers in teaching practice, the main benefits pre-set question bankpapers is not needed when many teachers participate in theand teaching and development being that fairer exam can be obtained for actual large-scale testing a pre-set question bank a large course areteachers changed each year, leading and to changes in course and examination isofnot needed whenand many participate in the teaching development of a large course and content
Summary
Resource-related conflicts may occur during term tests evaluating learning results and conducted among course participants within available classroom space. This may result in the infeasibility of unified exams (i.e., the use of the same exam papers at the same time). A common strategy used in this case is the random distribution of exams to students at different times. To address the disadvantages of administering exams across sessions, different exam papers must be administered for each exam. When an exam is conducted in two sessions and requires two exam papers, an ‘A/B exam papers’ strategy is applied. Each exam paper normally has the same number of question items and contains items that consistently test the same set of various knowledge points
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