Sharing of Prof. Dr. Lam Quang Thiep with DNU Examination Department about choosing assessment method and building exam question bank

Prof. Dr. Lam Quang Thiep, former Director of the Department of Higher Education (Ministry of Education and Training), is a person with many scientific research works and many profound articles on science and technology of measurement and assessment in education. The DNU Examination Department has asked to meet with him to listen to his sharing on choosing assessment methods and building a question bank. Towards the smooth and effective implementation of this work at DNU in the coming period.

Professor Lam Quang Thiep and one of his famous books.

DNU Assessment: Sir, when choosing an assessment method, most lecturers still choose essays and completely ignore multiple choice tests; what are the advantages of each of these assessment methods?

Essay and multiple choice tests both have their own advantages. Essay tests have the advantage of: less effort in creating test questions; assessing the ability to express; convenient for measuring creative thinking - suitable when the number of students is small. Multiple choice tests have the advantage of: test questions cover the content of the subject; less effort in marking; objective in marking; limited negativity; highly quantitative, applying measurement technology in analysis and processing to improve the quality of questions and test questions; providing accurate and stable data for use in assessments and comparisons in education - suitable when the number of students is large. This is analyzed in depth in the book "Measurement in Education - Theory and Application".

DNU Examination: Sir, is the multiple choice method feasible in assessing knowledge and skills?

Multiple choice tests assess both knowledge and skills. This depends on the way the questions are written and the characteristics of each profession. The content of any essay question can be converted into multiple choice questions to assess the corresponding knowledge and skills. Initially, people clearly distinguished between essay and multiple choice methods, but gradually these two methods converged. Essay questions, with multi-level scoring, are a multiple choice question, except that essay questions need to be scored by a person first and cannot be scored automatically by a machine.

DNU Examination: Sir, when implementing assessment according to output standards, many lecturers wonder which method to choose to assess the level of autonomy and responsibility?

The level of autonomy and responsibility assessed by essay, multiple choice or oral questions is also difficult. This is best and most closely assessed during the training process. At that time, the role of the lecturer in the process assessment is very important.

DNU Examination: Dai Nam University trains in an applied-oriented manner, so which assessment method is suitable?

With an applied orientation, a variety of assessment methods are most appropriate. For example, in a highly applied course, the assessment of skills, autonomy and responsibility will be assessed through practice and experience; while the knowledge part can be considered for assessment through multiple choice tests.

DNU Testing: Is the trend of multiple choice assessment reasonable when DNU has kicked off the digital transformation project?

Multiple choice assessment has been implemented by many schools and large corporations in the world for a long time (ETS, ACT...); Essay and writing sections are often very limited with a predetermined number of sentences/words. The orientation of multiple choice assessment is a reasonable trend. However, not all are assessed by multiple choice. It is necessary to base on the content, objectives of the course, the advantages of each method to choose the assessment method and aim for a variety of assessment methods.

Commemorative photo of the meeting of DNU Examination with Prof. Dr. Lam Quang Thiep

DNU Examination: Sir, what is the significance of building a question bank?

Building a question bank is extremely necessary in assessment activities. Building a question bank has many meanings, from the questions in the bank, it is possible to build exams according to the desired needs. Especially, creating equivalent exams (with the same level of assessment - DNU Examination), ensuring the requirements in assessment activities for learners. To do well, lecturers need to have assessment capacity and need to be proficient in the process of building a question bank.

DNU Examination: Sir, what is the key in the process of building a course's NHCH?

Once the objectives, course output standards, and course teaching content are available, the key to the NHCH development process is to build a course knowledge matrix (I often call it the Content-Objective Characteristics Matrix). This table will be the basis for building the exam structure; through this exam structure, the exam question set will be built.

DNU Examination: Sir, what is the biggest difficulty in building NHCHT?

The difficulties will be different for each educational institution. However, the biggest difficulty is the limitation in the understanding of lecturers about the science of assessment. Most lecturers are interested in improving the teaching content and teaching methods, but ignore or take lightly the assessment part. While the assessment part is very important to help promptly adjust and improve teaching activities. To overcome this, it is necessary to conduct training for lecturers and lecturers need to change their thinking to be ready to listen, ready to learn, ready to change.

DNU Examination: Sir, there are not many documents on assessment methods at present. How can staff and lecturers access them?

Documents on assessment methods are often published in small quantities or on order, so many copies are currently unavailable. Currently, I am planning to disseminate the science and technology of measurement and assessment in education to the university and college community through a number of online training courses; at the same time, I am organizing coordination between universities to jointly build NHCHs of similar courses in schools, in order to reduce costs and improve quality.

DNU Examination: Sir, what should we pay attention to when developing a question bank and organizing exams based on this question bank?

I think that to test on computers, there must be a good question bank and a process for creating equivalent tests on site for all candidates, only then can the results be compared. Randomly selected tests are not equivalent, so comparing results is meaningless. If this cannot be done, the first step should be to organize the test on paper, then use a machine to scan the test and score, analyze the results with specialized software. When there is a good question bank and software, the test will be tested on computers according to the correct process. At that time, it is also possible to design the test according to the Computer Assisted Response Testing (CAT) method as I described in the book introduced above.

DNU Examination: Thank you very much, sir. Wish you good health!

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