The preparation of students for their next step in the future is one of the main objectives of education. They must ensure that the students have sufficient knowledge of the subject matter. Only effective tests can guarantee this. A strong test result is not the only aspect that students should strive towards.
It is feedback that a student receives to enhance his abilities and knowledge, and a good teacher loves to refer back to it often to ensure that their instructional tactics are effective and to determine whether they require improvement.
It is not centric that kids worry endlessly about how they will perform on a particular test, how well the test questions are truly worded, and whether or not they know the answers or not.
What Are the Characteristics of a Good Test in Education?
What is a good test in education? It is an evaluation through which teachers measure learners’ abilities and points of weaknesses and strengths. It gauges their knowledge in the field of study and provides both sides with real feedback.
A good test should ensure that learners are ready to move to the next step whether this step is a high school, college, or even the military.
What Are the Qualities of Good Assessment?
An assessment is a process through which students can share their educational experiences. In order for a test to be a good tool for measuring students’ knowledge and skills, it should have the following characteristics of examination that are essential for the success of any test.
- Reliability or Consistency
Reliability or consistency of a test means that learners should perform the same or get the same score if they are exposed to different questions in different times and places. A test is considered reliable when the same result is achieved over different tests.
As James Carlson mentions in his research memorandum, “The reliability of test scores is the extent to which they are consistent across different occasions of testing, different editions of the test, or different raters scoring the test taker’s responses.” He also mentions some statistics to describe how a test can be reliable.
How to Make Sure Your Test Is Reliable?
- Score Distribution: The percentage of test takers at each score level.
- Mean Score: The average score, computed by summing the scores of all test takers and dividing by the number of test takers.
- Standard Deviation: A measure of the amount of variation in a set of scores. It can be interpreted as the average distance of scores from the mean. (Actually, it is a special kind of average called a “root mean square,” computed by squaring the distance of each score from the mean score, averaging the squared distances, and then taking the square root.)
- Correlation: A measure of the strength and direction of the relationship between the scores of the same people on two tests.
Reliability is the ratio of the true score and the observed score variance. To measure a test’s reliability, we may administer a test to the same group more than once. However, errors may occur as students may forget or have some physical problems. Thus, it is crucial to administer the same test in identical conditions to ensure that we will get the same results.
- Validity
A validity of a test can be achieved when the test measures what it is really intended to measure. Therefore, a certain criterion must be selected.
Validity is very important to gauge the quality of a given test as questions must be in line with the selected criteria and measures.
Here are some of the top different types of validity:
Content Validity: A test should fairly represent the content of the course or the field of study.
Criterion Validity: It is used to predict the performance of a job applicant or a student.
Convergent validity: This is mostly used in the field of sociology or psychology.
Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity means that a test of a concept is not highly correlated with other tests that are set to measure theoretically different concepts.
- Objectivity
According to Gronlund and Linn “Objectivity of a test refers to the degree to which equally competent scores obtain the same results,” the test should be away from any personal or subjective judgment. It should be based only on the evaluation of human development. For example, in an essay-type test, students answer differently as each one has his/her own style of writing.
Hence, when more than one instructor checks the test, they may give different scores according to whether they like the style or not. So, here, the test is less objective.
To avoid such bias, sharp rules should be set in evaluating such types of tests. There should be a unified guide for teachers to use while correcting such tests.
Personal judgment does not occur in true or false or multiple-choice tests. Besides, teachers should receive training on how to score a test as untrained teachers may give wrong scores and not be able to maintain the required fairness and accuracy.
- Comprehensiveness
A test should fully cover the entire field of study that students are exposed to during the course. Vague questions should not be included especially during online tests when students are confused and short in time.
- Absence of Ambiguity
There has to be no place for ambiguity especially in online tests where examiners are absent. Students should not be left in confusion and all questions have to be crystal clear.
According to Jacobs, Lucy C., from Indiana University, “ambiguous questions constitute the major weakness in college tests.
Ambiguous questions often result when instructors put off writing test questions until the last minute. Careful editing and an independent review of the test items can help to minimize this problem.”
- Preparation
To ensure the success of any test, instructors should take into consideration the following factors:
- Students have to be well-prepared for the test through extensive revisions and discussions.
- There should not be any gaps between the revision period and the exam.
- Examiners should make it clear to students which topics are expected to be tackled in the exam.
- Students should be well-trained for the test type.
- Appropriateness of Time
One of the top characteristics of a good test is when students have appropriate time to answer all questions. For example, essay questions require more time than multiple choice or true/false questions. Some teachers take the test themselves first and then double or triple the time for students. A good test is supposed to be practical and comprehensive.
Conclusion of Characteristics of Good Test
There is a strong sense, however, that the use of the word ‘characteristics’ or ‘criteria’ is not optimal. It implies the development of standards against which assessments could be judged.
Instead, it is believed there should be a general agreement that the word ‘framework’ captures our desire to create a structure that might be useful in the development of a good test in education more precisely.
7 Outstanding Characteristics of a Good Online Test
- No logistic setback
- Easy access from anywhere
- High speed
- Support essay questions, multiple-answer questions, short answers, & equation & scientific questions
- Built-in questions bank in quality online test systems
- Immediate students results reports are generated
- Highly detailed, error-free analytics reports on students’ performance as well as test and questions quality
How Do I Write a Good Test?
- Be specific
- Do not use ambiguous questions.
- Choose a suitable format for your test.
- Avoid the open-ended questions unless you are willing to accept any answer.
- Choose your words carefully and avoid any ambiguous language.
- Students should know how much each of the questions are worth.
To conclude, teachers should create their exams away from any subjectivity, ambiguity, or lack of comprehensiveness. The appropriate format should be selected to match the course materials and to measure students’ knowledge and skills.
15 Things You Need to Know about the Characteristics of a Good Test in Education
Here are 15 tips the American Board concluded its workshop “Modes of Classroom Assessment” with:
- Bloom’ theory of educational objectives classification, in which cognitive skills exist in a hierarchical order, is important in any assessment.
- Assessment works better when they are ongoing and integrated into instruction as opposed to episodic and marginally referenced to classroom instruction.
- Lots of faculty members use MCQs for their classes because they are able to cover much greater content and in a very short period of time; plus they’re known to be very easy, compared to other questions, and are quick to score.
- Many professors and test managers prefer to use other types of tests to to assess their students/examinees: essay, papers or electronic portfolios, projects, presentations tests.
- Both views are not incorrect! However, a great teacher would use all of the previously mentioned assessment forms throughout the academic year.
- The value of tests is much greater and more pronounced when they are performed as a part of a completely comprehensive program that’s designed to enhance learning, progress, performance, and the educational institution’s success
- “A comprehensive assessment-instruction system should contain a variety of assessment techniques.”
- A test can only test what it was formed to assess. So it’s up to the decision-makers to process the data generated from it.
- Summative assessments are called “assessments of learning,” and formative assessments are called “assessment for learning.”
- There should always be a balance between the intellectual skills being assessed.
- Specific and descriptive instructional feedback that will help students to improve their learning and prepare for mastery of the curricular topics are central to effective formative assessments.
- Frequent short tests are more instructionally helpful and provide better assessment data than infrequent extended exams.
- Diagnostic assessments measure a student’s current knowledge and skills for the purpose of identifying a personalized program of learning for that student.
- Quality assessments are valid, reliable and unbiased.
- A test is no better than the quality of items it contains.
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