- An exam question can be made more difficult or complex if it:
- requires knowledge outside the scope of your course,
- For example, a question that involves sorting or drawing from a deck of cards requires knowledge of decks of cards (e.g, of the colors of the suits).
- Not all students necessarily possess this type of cultural information.
- You can partially mitigate these problems of background knowledge by explicitly providing information relevant to the question (e.g., tell students “In a standard deck of cards, clubs and spades are black, and hearts and diamonds are red”).
- For example, a question that involves sorting or drawing from a deck of cards requires knowledge of decks of cards (e.g, of the colors of the suits).
- is not explicit about how students should answer,
- For example:
- More explicit (and thus clearer): ““Write a program to simulate an automatic vending machine that takes an array of integers containing the item number and the money provided to pay for that item and returns the change due.”
- Less explicit (and thus less clear): “Write a program to simulate an automatic vending machine.”
- For example:
- is phrased in a longer or unnecessarily complicated way,
- These questions can be more difficult to understand because the information is not clearly presented or the question uses vocabulary the student has not been exposed to.
- These factors can make questions harder to answer in biased ways.
- requires a very long answer, or
- requires thinking at a higher level of Bloom’s taxonomy.
- Thinking at a higher level of Bloom’s taxonomy is not a bad thing, just make sure you have adequately prepared your students for the types of questions you expect them to be able to answer.
- For instance, questions requiring evaluation or analysis will tend to be more difficult than those requiring only comprehension or knowledge recall.
- If students have not been scaffolded to higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy in your classroom, evaluation or analysis questions can unfairly discriminate based on experience students have outside of your classroom.
- Thinking at a higher level of Bloom’s taxonomy is not a bad thing, just make sure you have adequately prepared your students for the types of questions you expect them to be able to answer.
- requires knowledge outside the scope of your course,