Jesse,

I am a fellow Cornellian, although a bit later (graduated in 2001). I
didn't take Psych 101 but I think I know who the professor was - was it
Prof. Maas then, too? His son was in my year and we had several freshman
classes together and got to be good friends.

Sean


On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Jesse Lackey <jsl-ml@celestialaudio.com>
wrote:

> My 2c on all this.
>
> Long ago, I took Psych 101 at Cornell.  With several thousand other
> students.  Needless to say, the tests were all multiple choice.  The
> professor had been teaching it for years and had developed a large pool
> of multiple choice questions so that this semester's test#2 would have
> (mostly) different questions than last semester's test#2, etc.
>
> However, for every test some new questions would be developed and put
> in.  And even though this was the late 80s they did in fact have
> computers back then and the professor used statistical analyses to check
> how good the new questions were.
>
> For example: if there was an unusually wide spread of wrong answers,
> i.e. if the correct answer was (c), but there were a substantial number
> of people who answered (a), (b) and (d), or the correct answer was (c)
> but lots of people answered (b), then that is a clue that the question
> is badly written and/or the teaching material related to what the
> question was testing wasn't very good.
>
> You can go further of course, and see what students who did well on the
> "tried and true" questions did with the new ones.  If they did well,
> then (at least they) could understand them well.  If not, that's a
> pretty big clue the question(s) need improvement.
>
> The professor would mention after each test if there was a question that
> was "thrown out" because the statistics showed is was confusing.
>
> If you think about it a little, having several thousand questions and
> thousands of students semester after semester could yield some
> interesting long-term data.
>
> I remember very little of Psych 101, but nearly 20 years later, this
> nifty approach to iterative development stuck with me.
>
> It was "big-data analysis" back when the hot computer to have for
> research was the Mac SE.  :)
>
> J
>
>
>
> Dwayne Reid wrote:
> > At 02:36 AM 1/5/2015, William \"Chops\" Westfield wrote:
> >
> >> I'm actually pretty happy that people are arguing over subtleties in
> >> my proposed answers, rather than thinking that the questions are poor
> :-)
> >
> > This is a very interesting discussion and I greatly appreciate it.
> >
> > I mentioned that I have already provided criticism for their existing
> > pool of questions.  Much of that has been discussed here: poorly
> > worded questions leading to ambiguity, more than one possible correct
> > answer, too narrow a focus (questions relating to experience that
> > only a fraction of people might have), etc.
> >
> > I also appreciate the lists of questions provided.  I'm going to take
> > those with me as examples of questions that may want to be included.
> >
> > Please keep the suggestions coming!
> >
> > dwayne
> >
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