RELIABLE ASSESSMENT WITH CYBERTUTOR, A WEB-BASED HOMEWORK TUTOR

It is the end of semester and you have two students waiting to talk with you about their score in the final exam. You know what they want. Are you sure they deserve to fail? Are you wondering if that student who miraculously passed, deserved to pass? You are a fair teacher, and put all your effort into elaborating a fair final exam but have you ever tested how reliable your final exam was? Do you really believe that a 3-hour final exam will accurately reflect the precise “skill” level of every student? Socratic electronic homework tutor, CyberTutor can integrate effectively instruction and assessment. The following study shows that CyberTutor assessment has about 62 times less variance due to random test error than a three-hour final examination, and 53 times less variance than twelve weekly tests. This huge improvement results from the combination of three factors. First, the typical student interacts with CyberTutor for at least 48 hours per term, 16 times longer than the 3-hour final exam and 10 times more than 12 weekly tests together, diminishing the effect of lucky guesses and careless errors. Secondly, by considering requests for hints, solutions, and importantly the number of wrong answers and the time the student takes to complete each part of the problem, CyberTutor can make a much better determination of the student’s skill on a problem. Lastly if a problem is too difficult for the student as presented, CyberTutor’s hints and spontaneous responses to wrong answers systematically adapt the difficulty of the problem to the student’s skill level, and the CyberTutor assessment algorithm accurately determines that level.