Test Scoring

MUSC has a free of charge, 24-hour turn around grading service for your multiple-choice exams. While our old system is still in place, as described below, we are currently working on replacing it with a brand new system, which is scheduled to be in place July 1, 2008. For details and report description of our new exam system, please go to Remark.

Our current grading service

To grade exams, you may use two different forms:

Answer sheet A is red which has 200 5-choice answers.
Answer sheet B is green and has 150 5-choice bubbles and 50 15-choice bubbles.

When the students have completed their exams on one of the above answer sheets, the exam proctor puts a request form, the filled-out student answer sheets and a key sheet in an envelope. The exam may be taken to Kristi's office, or to the library circulation desk on the second floor. All forms are available free of charge in Kristi Rodgers' office (17 Ehrhardt Street, #3, ext 6-5043).

Your Report

Instructors are provided with a report on their multiple choice item test including an item analysis, reliability, frequency distribution of scores, and, if requested, individual student reports. Two scannable test sheets are available. One has spaces for up to 200 five-choice multiple choice items. The second has room for responses to 150 five-choice multiple choice items and 15-choice multiple choice items. Each answer sheet has spaces for name, date, student number, and analysis group (if used).

The report for the multiple choice test consists of several pages.

The first page details the mean and standard deviation of the test (both percentage and raw score) in addition to the reliability (using the Kuder-Richardson internal consistency formula number 20) and the standard error of measurement. Also supplied are the course's name, number, and instructor as well as the number of students and total number of items scored.

The second page of information is an alphabetical list of students including their student IDs (Social Security number or student ID) with their raw score, T-score and percentage score on this examination.
The third page provides this same information from page 2 but breaks the class into thirds based on the students' grades on this test, starting with the highest score.

The next page is a frequency distribution of the percentage scores.

The following page is an item by item summary of the test including the item number, number of students answering that item, the letter corresponding to the correct answer, the difficulty and discrimination indices, number and percentage of students omitting that item, and, for each response, the number and percentage of students selecting that alternative. The correct response is marked with an asterisk. Items that might be miskeyed are marked with three question marks.

The next page provides the items ranked by the difficulty index, starting with the highest value. (The higher the index, the easier the students found the item. For example, an item with a difficulty index of .95 means that 95% of the students knew the answer. The difficulty index varies from 0 to 1.) For each item, the discrimination index is also included.

Immediately following that, there is a listing of the items arranged by discrimination index, starting with the highest. (The discrimination index is roughly the difference between the percentage of students scoring in the top third of the class who got it correct minus the percentage in the bottom third of the class getting it right. The thirds are based on the performance on this test only. The index varies from -1 to +1.)

The last page of the printout is a list for posting including students' ID numbers (in numerical order from low to high), raw score, T score and percentage correct.

(Please read about Remark)