Re: [Phys-l] Anyone knows of a good test bank?

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

One must be careful because the questions are submitted by users, and
sometimes they are wrong.  I noticed some that were keyed to a particular
text and the answers were completely at odds with what the text presented,
and were obviously wrong.

Unfortunately it can not handle questions where the answers are drawings,
graphs, or text.  This limits the usable answers to 3 digit numerical
responses.  So you can not really check for understanding in many cases.
The service does vary the numbers so each student gets a somewhat separate
problem.

The last time I looked, it did not really have rich context problems, and in
either case this type of problem must be graded by hand.  Ranking tasks are
also difficult to handle by a service because you need to look at the
pattern of responses to judge what deficits the students have, rather than
just grading it right or wrong.

The good news is that this type of service does not seem to be harmful
compared to conventional homework, but it also does not seem to be any more
beneficial.  There was an article as I recall in AJP on this subject.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> Yes. Sign up with the University of Texas Homework System.
> https://hw.utexas.edu/bur/overview.html That will give you access to their
> bank of questions that they use for the their free homework site. Overall,
> I really like the questions, although there are some not to my taste. The
> number of questions is really quite large, so I'm sure that you'll find
> some that you like.
>
> Marc "Zeke" Kossover
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: smcccd <grigorescuv@smccd.edu>
> To: Forum for Physics Educators <phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 12:10:05 PM
> Subject: [Phys-l] Anyone knows of a good test bank?
>
>
> The test banks that I have used in the past were not user friendly and the
> problems were just one step, not complicated enough for the level of the
> textbook that they claimed that were intended for.  I had better luck with
> the test bank from The Brownstone Research Group for Halliday and Resnick.
> I am using Giancoli and the class is not calculus based.  Any
> recommendations?
> Thank you,
> Violeta
>
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