Reliability of mixed-format exams in higher education

• N. Garg ^[1] ; E. S. Lee ^[1]
  1. [1] Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax
• Localización: Advances in Higher Education / coord. por Josep Domènech i de Soria, Jaime Lloret Mauri, María Cinta Vincent Vela, Elena de la Poza Plaza, Elena Zuriaga Agustí, 2016, ISBN 978-84-9048-496-8, págs. 105-126
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In higher education courses, instructors often use mixed-format exams composed of several types of questions such as essays, short answer, problem solving, or multiple choice to evaluate student performance. It is important to discriminate reliably among students according to their performance on final examinations. The lower the reliability of student exam scores, the greater the error associated with making decisions based on them. Why then have we found no previous studies of reliability for the mixed-format exam, one of the most common types of evaluation? We review the literature on reliability and draw several conclusions that any researcher should consider when studying exam score reliability. We investigated the reliability of student scores on 12 official mixed-format final exams used in 22 classes with 1012 students in six undergraduate courses taught by five professors in three fields of business: finance, accounting, and statistics. We focussed on estimating internal consistency reliability, which is essentially a measure of the reproducibility of test scores. Using coefficient omega, the most appropriate measure for assessing reliability for mixed-format exams, we found that in these 22 classes score reliability averaged .85, with over 90% of the classes with reliabilities exceeding .80. These reliabilities are very high, comparable with those reported for professionally developed standardized tests and better than those reported recently for single-format multiple-choice exams in higher education.