By: Patrick Lyons, Director, Teaching and Learning
In what has been a particularly chilly and snowy December, it’s the end of the term at Carleton and that means its crunch time for students, instructors, teaching assistants and staff at the university.
Students are studying, preparing and writing exams, papers and submitting projects. Instructors and teaching assistants are madly marking, calculating and submitting final grades. Staff at Teaching and Learning Services are also working hard on many different projects, but some are particularly busy supporting the processing and marking of exams and helping with grade calculations.
Particularly relating to exam processing, the EDC provides a critical service to instructors who use multiple-choice exams as part of their assessment strategies; EDC staff members process the many, many, many Scantron answer sheets that students are completing right now.
Even though we use a high-speed scanner than can scan hundreds of exams per hour, the machine is in constant use five days a week eight to ten hours a day. We do our best to try to get exams processed within 48 hours of them being dropped off, but it can be tricky when many exams come in together or when there are very large classes.
After each exam is processed, we produce an item analysis that helps instructors identify the effectiveness of their questions and overall exam. This statistical report can identify potential mistakes in scoring, ambiguous questions or alternative answers (distractors) that don’t work. The report is included with the results from every exam that is processed. Information of how to interpret the item analysis is available at the EDC site and instructors are encouraged to meet with one Dr. Anthony Marini, one our assessment experts.
As I listen to the steady drone of the Scantron machine as it scans the exams, I decided to look up a few stats from last year’s December exam period:
- Total exam sheets scanned and processed: 35,854 exams
- Total number of courses: 285
- Departments dropping off the most exams: Psychology, Business, Law and Biology (Most of these courses are large enrollment first and second year courses, and many of these courses also include other forms of assessments as part of the courses’ overall assessment strategy.)
- Decibel level of scanner in full flight: 80 db (Average, measured non-scientifically with the iPhone app, Decibel.)
I expect this year will process a similar amount of exam sheets, if not a couple thousand more (Carleton’s first year class is larger this year than last year).