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January 2002

April 2002

September 2002

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Copyright © 2002 FSCreations, Inc.
All rights reserved.

A Remedy to a Painful Process
Over several years of teaching high school science, I have attempted to prepare tests and worksheets by a variety of methods. I remember many long winter nights of spreading out exams on the kitchen table after the kids were in bed in an attempt to cut and paste a final exam that was, literally, duct taped together. I also remember my frustration with a supposedly "great new" test generator that was all bells and whistles but that constantly crashed my computer and was cumbersome. Another frustration of mine was the students who were perpetually sick on test days. They would be "healthy" enough days later to take the test after talking to other students, and I did not have the time or resources to make up a different test for them. ExamView has helped change all of that.

Within just a few months, I have been able to go from hours of test preparation to minutes. Creating multiple copies of exams, complete with graphics, is just a click away. ExamView has greatly increased the "honesty" factor in test taking. Students now are well aware that I pass out multiple copies of tests and that it would be pointless to try to look on someone else's paper. I have also told them that those students who take the exam the first time get the "easy" questions and that I save the "tough" questions for the make-up exams. This has worked wonders during flu and cold season concerning the "health" of my students.

Horizontal Articulation
An unexpected benefit of this program is the question bank portion. Initially, I had to create all of the question banks myself. As more colleagues have started to use ExamView, we have begun to spread the work around. People are generating and sharing test banks. The real value of this is the discussions that we are creating in our department about what makes a good question, assessment, and the types of concepts that we teach and think are important.

Another key benefit of sharing test banks is that it helps with horizontal articulation. It is common to have several instructors teach the same course in a large school. Those teachers, to some extent, must be on the same page, which is the main idea of horizontal articulation. If chemistry teacher "A" teaches slightly different concepts than chemistry teacher "B" or there is a widely different grade distribution, word gets around. Parents and students start complaining. Theoretically, under these circumstances, the same student might get a completely different grade solely based on the teacher and not the course content. On the other hand, if everyone is on the same page all the time, teachers have little freedom to change their methods of instruction and assessment to meet the needs of the individual students. This also becomes a problem during exam time. The first class to take the exam has a harder time than the following classes, as word about the exam gets around.

Building the Question Bank Library
We have found ExamView to be a huge help. First, the ExamView Import Utility makes it relatively easy to convert large worksheets and tests into an exam question bank. Second, instructors teaching the same class can agree to use a certain percentage of common questions from the bank and another percentage of questions that they have tailor-made to fit the needs of their students and their individual teaching style. It is the best of both worlds and a logical answer to a problem that satisfies most concerned parents and administrators.

We are looking forward to a time when teachers around the country will have shared access to huge banks of thoughtful, well-written, teacher-generated, peer-reviewed questions. This will provide a kind of horizontal articulation that is needed across the country. A new generation of teachers will have access to the collective wisdom of seasoned veterans and will, in turn, add to the knowledge base. (Note: The ExamView forum http://forum.fscreations.com/ provides an opportunity to facilitate sharing question banks among instructors around the world.)

Pushing the Envelope
Physics students need a great deal of opportunity to solve different variations of the same problem. The problem-solving method in most trajectory or momentum problems is basically the same; there are simply changes in the details from problem to problem. It can become tedious to constantly generate new problems of this kind, not because the problems are difficult to solve, but simply because there are a great many steps and it can become time consuming. There is also the possibility of making careless errors when creating the answer key.

To solve this dilemma in the past, I wrote a series of Excel spreadsheets containing three different interlinked sections. In the first section I type in the values for the variables. The second section uses those variables to create a word problem narrative. The third section uses the same variables to solve the problem and create the answer key. This solution works well for stand-alone tests but does not integrate well into larger, cumulative tests.

Now I can still use that resource to create multiple questions of the same kind, but with different variables. I can cut the cells out of Excel and paste them into an ExamView question bank, along with the correct answers. ExamView allows me to create multiple versions of the same question types in the time it takes to change the variables, cut, and paste. Even formatting-such as subscripts, superscripts, font, size, and color-is carried over.

I have heard that a similar function may become available in ExamView in time. I anxiously await its debut. In the meantime, I can easily integrate my existing Excel investment into ExamView.

Sharing ExamView Content
Most of us have suffered through the experience of purchasing a specialized piece of software, only to watch it become obsolete. Ask anyone who invested in DOS- based test generation software. Not only are the programs obsolete and not executable, but the test banks themselves are inaccessible. Anyone who has invested time and energy in such software only to be left back at square one with the latest change in an operating system becomes very leery of the next "great idea" on the block. In fact, many are tempted to become neo-Luddites, going back to their filing cabinets and tape.

Being one such person burned by orphaned software, one of the things that I like about ExamView is its ability to export to rich text (RTF). This allows my precious investment in question banks to be independent of the ExamView software itself. I can rest easy knowing that my data is in a universal format. I can even send copies of ExamView-created tests as Word documents to my professional colleagues in India, who do not yet have access to ExamView. I am pleased that the programmers at FSCreations had the good sense to open many lines of input and output with their software. For just that reason, I probably will not need to worry about ExamView becoming obsolete.

Greg Presnall and Chad Husting
Sycamore High School
Cincinnati, Ohio