I had fun creating the quiz for economics. As promised, I turned it loose on my students, with an interesting outcome. The story needs just a little background.
The economics final is 30 multiple choice questions plus some short answer questions, which are worth about 25% of the total. This year, we decided to focus the short answer questions on two articles plus aggregate demand. This information was communicated to the students in all sections.
Between Monday Dec 6 and Wed Dec 15, we receive about 2m (over 6 feet) of snow. It is very early for the snow this year, and this amount is about half a years worth on average. The college was closed for 3.5 days in this period, which wiped out all of my review classes, and caused the final exam to be rescheduled.
Yesterday, the other instructors on this course sent out emails saying that their students had blown the short answer portion of the test, and that we may need to do some adjusting. My class scored about 15% higher than the other sections, primarily due to the review they had from the online quiz. The quiz focused their attention on knowing the calculations they needed to do on the exam, and even though the exam questions were quite different in format, the students figured it out!
Unfortunately, due to the free nature of the quiz, I do not have a record of which students completed the quiz and what their scores were, as that would be a very interesting correlate. On the face of the anecdote, I am convinced this was a good learning tool.
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