These are the Easiest and Hardest Final Exam Questions
Paul BarneyHello! I’m Paul Barney, Coordinator of Test Development for the Foundations program, and in this space I’ll be taking you behind the curtain to look at the quantitative side of language learning and assessment.
We collect a lot of data on the Foundations English final assessments, and no data is more important than the ability of students and the difficulty of items (test developers call questions “items” because every profession needs to have special jargon).
You might be wondering which were the easiest and most difficult items on the whole final assessment. Because these items are going to be rewritten anyway, I can show you! Out of all the 873 items used on this semester’s final English assessments, this vocabulary item was the easiest:
I want to drink some ____________.
- town
- bread
- coffee
- word
This item is so easy that even a beginning Level 1 student at HCT (CEPA score 150) has a 99% chance of getting it right! Clearly HCT students know their coffee.
This was the hardest item:
____________ feeling ill, Ali worked hard all day.
- As a result
- Therefore
- Despite
- Because of
This item is so difficult that if it were not a multiple choice item, only 4% of Level 3 students could have gotten it right. Of course, because it’s four-choice multiple choice the success chance in reality normally wouldn’t get much lower than 25%, which is what your chance would be if you were totally guessing.
This guessability of multiple choice items means that we can’t measure a student with items that are too hard, because then a correct response is more likely to be the result of a lucky guess than of a student’s actual ability! Next time, I’ll show you more about how we can help prevent guessing from distorting our assessments.
To think about: After a late night of not studying, two students take a test consisting of all four-choice multiple choice items. The first student picks a random choice for each item, either a, b, c, or d. The second student picks c for everything. Which student will probably get a higher score?
