Dear All, At the outset, as some one directly involved/connected with the two instances University of Mysore, Students Test and the InfoQuiz 2005 (as I was the Project Leader), I would like to offer my response to many of the issues raised by Ms. Suvarsha Walters in her mail online tests, quizzes, pedagogical issues, fairness in general and online testing in particular. Though I am tempted to go into a detailed discussion-I will try to be as brief as possible. First a general disclaimer 'I am not claiming that all is well with Online Testing/Quizzing, in the same way as in any evaluation! No method or system is fool proof or fair!' Philosophically speaking - there is nothing fair in this world as nothing is absolute and everything is subjective/relative. Each one of us is advantaged /disadvantaged due to one or the other factor and there in enters the fairness /unfairness factor! Can we compare the advantages of being at a privileged institution such as IISc with all the facilities to that of other less privileged institutions with no facilities? Is it fair to compare at all? Can any comparison be on equal footing? Can we ever offer a level playing field in any arena? The fundamental question is what is an advantage and what is a disadvantage? Everything comes with a price attached-including the advantages.The disadvantages many a times spur the motivation and determination to succeed ! George W Bush won the elections in the year 2000 and went on to become one of the powerful men in the world- was his election a fair one? When a critical and highly consequential process as political elections are a chance factor, what do you make of quizzes which are known -perhaps in all fairness, in some countries as - trivia? More importantly, both the instances were not of serious nature-something that would affect the career or future. The Infoquiz2005 was a competition and the objective was edutainment- create an academic event of fun and excitement. Long-term objective is to create an identity and fuel an interest in the field, which is still evolving. The second instance was actually a kind of class test (that too a retest) organized mainly to give the students another chance, excite them and of course to train them in taking online tests. One of the students was I guess, carried away by his enthusiasm of being able to take a test while being away, perhaps was a trifle too enthusiastic to report it in the LIS Forum. Coming to the specific issue of Online Quiz /Test. We must understand that Online Quizzes belong to the Open Book Exam variety , which is considered as an innovation and more in tune with reality. Open Book test variety is generally considered a hard nut to crack and therefore believed to raise the bar for learning. Over thirty and odd years ago Alvin Toffler in his best selling book Future Shock (1971) in a chapter entitled "Education in the Future Tense" decried the fact that we are educating our children to live in the past rather than in the future. One key element of our education system is the way in which we test our students. There are several reasons why closed book testing is not considered a valid method of testing. One argument is that they are pure memory oriented and the other is that classroom does not represent a real world scenario as once out of the classroom; the student will always have access to whatever resource materials are needed for the problem at hand. Open Book Quizzes in themselves are considered great pedagogic tools as they create an interest to find answers. If our objective is learning, then testing should also be learning oriented. Studies have also shown that quizzes entice students to find the correct answers to the ones that they have got it wrong. Psychological studies reflect that one never forgets the ones that went wrong!Quizzes offer some unique advantages as they allow students to submit the quiz upon completion and immediately receive the quiz score and correct answers with explanations, providing instantaneous feedback on the quiz etc. Further more, students gain experience taking computerized examinations, which are a very common format today in the world. Many studies have also shown that students are quite enthused about the quizzes.Coming to the InfoQuiz 2005- keeping the Open Book format in view, the questions were generally selected in such a way that a simple Googling would not get the answers- I personally Googled before posing those questions! That is also the reason for the strict adherence to the Time Factor those who took more than one hour were disqualified even when they got higher score! We had also tried to balance between pure LIS and IT/INTERNET related topics to offset these advantages.We have done an analysis of all the responses and it does not indicate that searching the INTERNET has been the factor for high score either. The simplest question on Soople answer to which could have been found by a simple Google search was answered correctly by a mere 26% of the people who took the online quiz.Finally coming to the issue of Engineers the question perhaps hinges on who is an Information worker? One of the objectives of the InfoQuiz was create an interest in the field and a brand for the profession and so welcomed the interests of the engineers for InfoQuiz. Incidentally Garfield was a chemistry graduate with a Ph.D in structural linguistics and the winning team - Garfield Team had an interesting combo of one chemical engineer and one NCSI student. Do you call this fair or???LIS profession has always welcomed specialists and contributions from other domains and has been enriched because of that very reason.----- Shalini Dr. Shalini R. Urs Director Information and Communication Division & Professor and Chairperson Department of Library and Information Science University of Mysore Mysore-570006 India Tele:91-821-2514699 Fax :91-821-2519209 Suvarsha Walters said:
Hello all,
One has to question the fairness of online tests if what is at stake is very significant - like if you are conducting it to select students for a course etc. It gives ample scope for malpractices, like searching the Internet or taking the help of an expert to answer.
The recent quiz conducted by Informatics had four B.E. candidates out of the six who qualified for the finals. A significant number of questions in the quiz were related to LIS profession. So we have to question if online tests are really as wonderful as they seem to be.
This is not to critize Informatics, because they did a great job. This is to highlight the shortcomings and take it into account for the next time.
Online tests are great if it is just an evaluation of what has been studied and the student benifits by being able to take the test at his/her own time and place.
This is a good tool. But we need to be careful while using it.
with regards,
Suvarsha
Suvarsha Minj, Project Assistant, National Centre for Science Information Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore - 560 012
************************************************************************
On Sun, 8 May 2005 15:40:54 +0100 (BST), shashi kumar wrote
Dear Sir/Madam,
Glad to inform u that recently Dept of LISc, University of Mysore, has conducted on line test to its students. really a good effort towards modernising LIS education. One of the student was able to attend the test via Internet sitting in his hometown.Such kind of an effort really helps to learn more about cutting-edge technologies and its implications in LISC. A good approach we all benefited lot from this. we hope that such kinds of efforts will continue and helps to compete in the global village. thanks to the chairperson and all the faculty of Dept of LIS.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------> ------------------------------------ "Kowledge is productive only when it is applied to make a difference"
-Peter Drucker
Shashi Kumar A.A.
Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partneronline.
_______________________________________________ LIS-Forum mailing list LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum