Hello,

Preventing exams from being posted on the Internet is a never-ending battle. There are 20,000 instructors and 1 million students with access to data that can transmit around the globe at the speed of light. We understand your desire for test banks. We do author a fairly large bank of questions for an entire course. Most courses have 500-600 items authored between the pretest, quizzes, chapter exams, finals, practice finals, and certification practice. However, we specifically design questions at different levels depending on their usage to help the students learn in a progressive fashion. Curriculum-embedded interactive activities, build up to quizzes, which provide the foundation for chapter exams. Chapter exams build up to checkpoint and final exams just as labs and PT activities build up to the Hands-On Skills Assessment. Finals usually contain integrative, more summative tasks. Moving items around that are designed for different purposes can get really tricky. If we moved an item designed for a final exam to a chapter 3 exam, some of the distractors/options may not have been presented until later in the course. This item is great for a summative final, but not for that exam. We also design the assessments to align with the scope and coverage of the competency statements for the course.
Currently, we perform as many periodic refreshes as we can with a focus primarily on the final exams. The final exams have a bank of field test items. We gather statistics and analyze data on these questions before adding them as scored items to the final exam, in order to ensure the quality of the questions. Your students receive two unscored items each time the exam is launched. When we refresh the final, we change the entire exam, pulling in new questions that have been field tested and analyzed for quality. In addition, this increases fairness because we create multiple forms of the finals that are statistically equivalent and topically balanced.

However, maintaining exam banks for the many (12+) courses that are out there becomes a maintenance challenge as we try to develop new courses. As a part of the solution to this, the newer courses have “quiz banks” that instructor can augment, edit and deploy to complement the online assessments to help differentiate those who know from those who do not. Two other things that have been effective with students is oral examination and increased focus on hands-on exams. So as we work through technical, scalability, design and validity issues around test banks in the online exams, we hope that people are taking advantage of the quiz banks and other resources.

Thank you!

Hi Tom,
Thank you for your feedback. I have sent your ideas on to the appropriate team.
Best,
Kimberly