A question bank is created with an aim to assimilate all important questions that are relevant to students of a particular grade and can be used during an examination while preparing the test paper. Both, subjective and objective questions form a part of the question bank to provide a good pool of assessment-worthy content. With the advent of EdTech culture, educators can now easily formulate important questions on a software and store it digitally for easy reference in future.
Markezy is a tried & tested ‘assessment platform’ that supports schools in digitalizing the whole examination & evaluation process, thereby eliminating the traditional pen & paper format. It offers maximum convenience to educators such that the answer paper can be evaluated anytime, anywhere, from any device. The software even suggests important questions from the syllabus and recommends it to paper setters, so that they don’t waste time in collating and preparing topics, just before the parodic tests. IB Schools in Dubai and GCC countries, including other progressive regions across the world have collaborated with Markezy and added it into the ERP system.
Preparing a question bank is the first step for any online exam and here are a few characteristics or examples that can be adhered to while curating a set of questions for exams:
- Word the questions in an easy to understand format by using simple and clear language as per the level of comprehension by students.
- The questions must not create confusion and must be properly framed such that children have clarity on the topic they are attempting.
- Not too easy, not too tough, should be the rule! If the question is too straightforward it gives out the answer directly and doesn’t compel students to think. On the other hand, slightly complex questions will make learners use their knowledge and apply the learnings in an appropriate manner.
- Each set of test paper must have equivalent weightage given to subjective type questions and objectives. Also, there shouldn’t be any bias while preparing the paper and having one set of test paper is extremely difficult to attempt, as compared to the others.
- It is a good practice to prepare 3-4 sets of papers with the order of questions jumbled, to avoid any cheating or malpractice by students while attempting the online exams.
- Along with the change in order of questions, examiners can use assessment platforms such as Markezy to auto choose 30 out of the 100 important questions from the question bank and randomly create sets with a different cluster of 30 questions, such that the educator can gauge every student’s knowledge over a wide spectrum of topics. To learn more about Markezy and avail it in the Middle East or UAE region, visit our website: https://knowledge-hub.com/markezy/
Steps to set-up a Question bank
Choose Topic and Draft Questions
The subject teacher can login to the school’s assessment system and type out all the questions that are important from an examination point of view. One can even allocate sub-categories under the main topic to streamline & make things more systematic.
Each question needs to be allocated with marks as per its level of difficulty. There should be no room for ambiguity and marks should be clearly stated to avoid any chance of discrepancy while checking the examination paper. Also, how many marks are to be given for steps, what is the maximum marks one can score per question, is there any negative grading, what are the criteria or important pointers that are to be included in the long format essay type answers- all this needs to be decided in advance by the examiner.
Predetermine the Pattern
The pattern or format of the examination paper can be fed into the system and details regarding the allocation of time to each question, marks for attempting the answer, type of difficulty level, topic covered under each section, etc. can be predetermined early on.
Auto generating Exam Paper
Once the system has been fed with appropriate important questions, marks, and time allocation, it is ready to auto-generate a question paper. Different sets can be extracted with a mix-bag of difficult & easy questions. Students will be allocated unique IDs and they can login to attempt the test. The time limit for paper submission and time allocated to each question is also fixed, for students to keep a tab of their progress & complete the answers on time.