Since we are still in COVID-19 period and perform online learning for most courses, what is the type of question you see suitable in this case? Assay problems or multiple choice or true or false or a hybrid of them? Please explain why
The objectives of assessing and examining students during this pandemic using the online delivery modes must be made very clear and communicated to the students through the coursework clearly. Does the objective of the lesson target improving the writing skill ? In that case, essay or open ended questions are better. The next question is how have you planned to control your students during the exam or test? Exams must be written in safe and controlled environments. Are you using any software to manage plagiarism? In many cases, mixed questions might help you assess students effectively.
If the exams are taken in an online/remote mode - most likely you cannot hinder students from googling the answers and using all sorts of materials. So questions about knowledge might not work.
Only tasks that demand students to be creative, transfer knowledge, apply knowledge etc. might work with online exams.
This is an excellent question Professor and rarely addressed. I think each faculty member has different objectives, some teachers' primary objective of the exam is to highlight the most core concepts in the course, some of them just want to differentiate the students by setting different degrees of complexities in the exam. And sadly, some of them just want to see a normal distribution in the grades curve regardless of any other factors.
Depending on the objective, one could easily design a test that serves its purpose, so I think the important question is "what should the main objective of examination be?", particularly in STEM fields. And based on the primary objective, how can the online test fulfill this objective, with recognizing its limitations.
The link below contains a brief description of seven types of examination questions, as well as tips for using each of them: 1) multiple choice, 2) true/false, 3) matching, 4) short answer, 5) essay, 6) oral, and 7) computational. https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/developing-assignments/exams/questions-types-characteristics-suggestions
Check https://usq.pressbooks.pub/academicsuccess/chapter/types-of-exams/
It is better to provide questions that only require one sentence or at most two. Multiple choice questions will take a lot of space and this is also true for essay type questions.
Questions are meant to test if the knowledge has been well conveyed . They include: Essays, computational questions, matching questions, multiple choice questions, oral questions, practical questions, short answered questions e.t.c. My favorite is the essay questions because the proffesor can see if the student has understood the concept or not.
If on-line teaching will be the choice, then I think Hermann Gruenwald 's last comment sums up the argument! My personal choice is 90% carefully shuffled & 10% essay type because of time limitation!
First of all, the organization of the exam depends on the discipline. For example, chemistry or biochemistry is very different from medical clinic or surgery, or even from the humanities, because the setting of the questions changes a lot. However, whatever the modality you will use within your discipline, the difference for the teacher is minimal. The answers will always tell you if the student has studied and understood the question. I think that there is no greater or lesser objectivity on how to take an exam. It all depends on the teacher.
Objective questions: supply and selection type, alternative response type like true or false
Arrangement type. Matching type and multiple choice type
Now a days normal question papers are not at all working during covid restriction so now we should think that works better in vertual classroom concept and i think objective type question paper are better than any other types of question
It depends on so many things. Experts usually recommend to check the cognitive level we are assesing first, and then decide the best way to do it, because multiple choice items, for example, are "better" for evaluate the first cognitive levels (remember, understand, apply), and then for more complexe levels is better some other kind of tools like essays or PBL for example, wich can be assesed with rubrics. Now that many of us are working online, it has been tricky to decide and not always up to us to do it. My problem is more an ethic issue. We all know they tend to cheat, and online is quite easy to do it. The question is, should we take the responsability for their dishonesty?
I think to make sure that they have a good understanding we should do all of them. We just need to make the exams more concise.