Quizbank

Two parallel sets of assessment bank resources

Quizbank hosts "live" (editable) links for development

Those involved in the construction of an open source quizbank will tend to uses these subpages of Quizbank:

College Physics I&II         Calculus Physics I&II^[3]         Astronomy         How things work         List of quizzes

PDF printable files for classrooms

Students and instructors seeking a secure^[4] CMS environment may post a permalink of one of these OpenStax College pages:

College Physics         University Physics^[5]         Astronomy         How Things Work

Under construction

• Astronomy college course/Sandbox (See how students in a computer lab can edit anomalously in "Presidential" pages)
• Astronomy college course/Chasing Pluto (complete but must be inserted into Astronomy)
• Physics_equations/27-Wave_Optics/Q:interference (complete but must be inserted into Calculus Physics)

What is Quizbank?

Quizbank is an effort to create an open source "bank" of exam questions that can be coauthored by instructors and students, and used by instructors in grade assessment.

The word "Quizbank" was chosen because a Google search reveals that testbank has another meanings related to software development, and because assessment bank has too many syllables. A new word was chosen because this will be an open source testbank: When made large enough, it will be useful for grade assessment. By making the questions available to all, we avoid the cost and futility of keeping the questions concealed from students. And we create a resource that can accept contributions from students.

The ideal quizbank ("assessment bank") is accompanied by software that allows a user to quickly select questions from the bank. The current software is under construction, freely available to anybody who requests it, but not ready for use by instructors. Until that software is developed, a limited number of exams are available that were constructed by randomly selecting questions from quizbank. At the moment, this service is only available for college Astronomy.

To view a list of quizzes associated with Quizbank visit Category:Quizbank/bank and its subcategories.

Why we need this Quizbank

It costs $91 to take an AP exam,^[6] but the real cost of exams is not the fee, but the cottage industry^[7] of schools and professors creating exams and preparing students to take those exams. The internet offers every person on this planet the opportunity to master many subjects at no cost. Now we need a way for people to demonstrate mastery at little or no cost. Student debt has recently surpassed credit card debt in the USA.^[8] While an opensource quiz (assessment) bank will never offer degrees in higher education, it might reduce the cost of that degree. It will allow professors to ensure that students have solved a few basic physics problems or learned some fundamental facts about Astronomy, before attempting to learn the subtleties of the topic. The answers and problem solutions are freely available, so that students can learn these basics as virtually zero cost, and with little or no help from the instructional institution.

• See also OpenStax College, especially #Sometimes_less_is_more

An important limitation of this Quizbank

The proposed assessment-bank must represent a sufficiently small portion of the course for two reasons:

1. Such assessments have limited value
2. A course that focuses exclusively on such assessments has virtually no value

This limitation is especially true for the so-called conceptual physics and astronomy courses, where concepts are tested by multiple choice questions. An exam of this sort will typically contain 20-50 questions. This limitation can be alleviated if the exam is printed so that half of each page is blank, with the space reserved for students to discuss/explain the questions on that page.^[9]

Wikiversity Quizbank questions have to be different

Open source means that students can see the questions, which renders "cheating" virtually impossible.^[10] A number of remedies are possible for this:

1. If the question is conceptual, have a number of questions available that use different wording.
2. Attempt to make numerical questions use the same names. If every person driving a car is Mr. Smith (or Mrs. Smith), then students won't be able to associate the required formula with the name of the person.
3. Require that students submit multiple choice questions as part of their course requirement.
4. Include an essay or short answer component to exams. There is no reason why an instructor shouldn't subtract points when a student demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of a multiple choice question that was included in the study guide.

A need for software development

The current bank is managed using MATLAB programs that only a MATLAB programmer who understands the codes could use. Until this is corrected, we can only post "study guides" that typically consist of two times as many questions as will be on the actual test.^[11]

Technical details

Alternatives to Quizbank

• allthetests.com Is there any possibility of a collaboration with these people? It's not unlike a wiki, but they use advertisements.
• Quizlet is also commercial but with a minimum of advertisements. It is used by Wikiversity's IT Fundamentals.

Footnotes, index, and references

1. ↑ http://www.learningpod.com/workbook/openstax-anatomy-and-physiology/658a9bcc-378e-49c1-81d1-194724efef94
2. ↑ http://go.learningpod.com/blog/final-message-from-learningpod
3. ↑ also known as "University Physics"
4. ↑ The Course Management System is secure because a permalink to this page is uneditable and because the page contains permalinks to pdf files. To ensure that it is the right version of the page, students must obtain the correct URL from the instructor.
5. ↑ (i.e., Calculus based Physics)
6. ↑ http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/exam/calendar/190165.html
7. ↑ It's not really a cottage industry, but resembles on in its decentralized nature and lack of efficiency. It costs lots of money to devise exams, and then teach students to take those exams.
8. ↑ http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/jun/10/mark-warner/warner-says-us-student-debt-has-surpassed-credit-c/ amd http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Student_debt&oldid=658255096#United_States
9. ↑ Since one purpose of this quizbank is to reduce the cost of college education, it is worth noting that the instructor may elect to grade only one essay per exam.
10. ↑ Cheating is impossible, provided the test is well proctored. It seems that in the future, only "brick-and-mortor" schools will be able to properly proctor an exam. Someday colleges and universities will catch up and realize that they need to support the proctoring of on-line courses that are hosted by distant sites, IMHO
11. ↑ To illustrate the non-user friendly nature of these codes, three hours were wasted because the spreadsheet used to select questions contained a space instead of a empty cell, and the person who wrote and used the code had to run the code in debug mode until the problem was identified.