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Students often find biology courses to be very difficult and isolating, particularly if they identify as part of a group that has been historically excluded from STEM. Some of this anxiety and isolation comes from high-stakes exams. We decided to use the collaborative structure of two-stage exams to try to overcome the isolation of assessment. In two-stage exams, students take an individual exam, and then immediately get into groups and take the exam again, discussing the questions and the rationale behind the answers. Their exam scores are a combination of the two attempts. Our move to emergency online learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to try our two-stage exams online. In this Teaching Tools and Strategies essay, we discuss our process of offering two-stage exams online at two different institutions: a two-year Community College and four-year Research University. We share feedback from the students and discuss our iterative improvements to two-stage exam use.
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One Solution to Addressing Assessment Logistical Problems: An Experience Setting Up and Operating an In-person Testing Center
To address the challenges of running exams in large enrollment CS courses, we set up and operated an in-person testing center at a minority serving institution. We have run the testing center for two quarters, proctoring over 6,000 exams for eight CS courses with approximately 1,800 students. In this experience report, we discuss the motivation for the testing center, its set-up and operation, and the lessons that we have learned from our first two quarters of operation. In addition, we present student and instructor feedback regarding use of the testing center, future steps, and improvements. By sharing, we hope that other schools can learn from our experience and improve upon our methods to help establish best practices for testing center configuration and operation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2013334
- PAR ID:
- 10514664
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- ISBN:
- 9798400704239
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 317 to 323
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Computer-based assessments CS Education Summative Assessments
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland OR USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630902
