A Low-Budget Large-Scale Approach Sample Clauses

A Low-Budget Large-Scale Approach. ‌ The following method was used for a number of years in the Mathematics Department at the University of Warwick, for a first-year number theory module taken by 150 students and also for a third-year representation theory module taken by 60. Both topics were suited to multiple-choice testing, because the subject matter offered scope to use calculations to measure a student’s understanding and simultaneously to provide plausible distractors. We will concentrate on the number theory module, which ran for five weeks of the summer term, immediately before the start of the exam period. The syllabus material was delivered entirely in five weekly workbooks, written by Xxxxxxx staff in the style of books by Burn (1992; 1997), mostly concentrating on sequences of problems. Topics covered included modular arithmetic, arithmetic functions, inversion formulae and continued fractions; many of the problems included calculations. The workbooks were distributed (online and in hard copy) at the start of each week, when students sat a 50-minute multiple-choice test on the content of the previous week’s workbook. The test was held in the lecture theatre allocated for the module and came in four versions, with questions permuted to minimise plagiarism. Test questions were based on the exercises and problems in the workbooks, and answer sheets were marked automatically by optical reader and processed by computer. Scores were normalised so that random guessing led to a zero score on average; negative scores were raised to zero. Two sets of tests were created for use in alternate years to minimise the chance of students passing down the answers from year to year. Students were handed complete answer sets as they walked out of the test and the solutions to the workbook questions were then published online. Each test accounted for 5% of the module credit, and so a quarter of the final marks were based on multiple-choice questions. There was a close correlation between the average test scores and performances on the final exam, which also contained workbook problems. University regulations prevented greater weight being given to the tests as they were classified as coursework. From year to year, statistical analysis of the test results helped to increase the proportion of discriminating questions and to improve the multiple-choice distractors. The module always began with a single organisational meeting to tell students how it worked. In the early years, weekly support classes were...