Exams, Test...

Last section of Grade six.
I am amazed by these pupils  for what took the teacher days to make took them just under twenty minutes to finish. It's frustrating to think that after all the the test makers' efforts, some pupils do not even make an effort to read the test items; they just circle letters randomly, and they do not even try to answer essay questions.

The third week of January is the scheduled examination week for the third quarter grading period. So, teachers are supposed to be making their tests now. We should now be writing our table of specifications, making questions based on the table and having it checked by the master teacher of the subject. But...hehehe...teachers' weekends are sacrosant.

There are some things that tests and examinations cannot measure. I teach music and paper tests for music cannot measure the pupils'  musicality. 

Things to remember in making a test: Prepare test questions based on the lessons taught or tackled within the grading period, organize the test from easy to difficult, vary the test type from multiple choice, matching type to essay; distractors should be related to the correct answers so that the pupils would find it quite challenging to get the correct answer and not just use simple common sense to figure out the correct answer, and make sure the instructions are simple and easy to understand. Basically, these are the things to remember in test construction

Validity and reliability are things best left to the teachers of Measurement and Evaluations.

Tests are difficult to construct now because purely objective tests are discouraged. Gone are the days of purely objective test. 

Test items like this are discouraged:

        1.      What do you use to cut wires?

a.      Wire Cutter                       b. Hammer            c. Screw Driver

  Today’s test items are situational.

Example:

     1.      Mang Pedro and his family was watching TV when the electricity went out. He looked for cause of the black out, and he found out that main switch’s fuses was busted. He bought replacement fuse. What tool should Mang Pedro use to remove and replace the fuse?

a.      Pliers                     b. Hammer                  c. Screw Driver

Imagine how difficult this is especially for subjects that use English for instruction. (Lucky for me, all the subjects I teach use Filipino.) Just making up of the situations takes a lot of time plus making sure that the items are grammatically correct, etc., then the encoding. The result: a three page-legal sized-front and back test instrument (or whatever these examinations are called by educators).

I have nothing against “situational” tests except foe the extra effort it entails for the teachers. Anyway, the advantages for the pupils are many. Primary is that it promotes reading comprehension. Logical thinking is enhanced. It promotes skills in recognizing cause and effect, making predictions, processes, etc.

It’s just that this kind of test is so difficult to construct especially for a lazy teacher like me.