Sunday, October 22, 2006

Designing an Interactive Final Exam

I gave my students a choice: a traditional pen-and-paper exam with the standard true/false, multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, essay... or an interactive final exam which is obviously more experimental. Absolutely NONE of the students opted for the traditional exam, even though it would probably be easier (or at least, easier to prepare for).

This is good, because now I only have to design one final exam and not two :-)

My first task as a combination game designer / instructor: come up with a set of rules for an interactive final. So far I have:
* I'll demo a series of games, retro and modern. For each game, I'll point out certain aspects of the game and then ask related questions to each student in turn. So, it's kind of like an oral exam. In a group. With games.
* After a student answers (or is unable to answer), other students can elaborate or disagree for extra points.

If you have comments on the rules, feel free to post them here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What was your method of assessment?

Ian Schreiber said...

For each question I had a checklist of points I was looking for in the answer (along with % weights for scoring purposes). As the student answered I could tick them off. Added blank space for additional things the student mentioned that I thought were good points I hadn't thought of initially, and also things the student mentioned that were actually incorrect. Second column for other student answers, in the same method. So during the exam I'd be frantically writing and taking notes on a clipboard (one sheet per question). After the exam was over I'd dump all the points into a spreadsheet and calculate totals.