On-demand placement test options within a moodle environment

ABSTRACT

Members of a private Liberal Arts College in Japan have administered a placement test for new, returning, and transfer students at the beginning of each academic year for more than ten years. The placement test until the onset of COVID-19 in 2020 had been a 57-item test composed exclusively of material from Cengage Learning for use with the World Link textbook series, the series of choice for all first-year students. Since 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the placement test has changed from an in-house sit-down event to an online, On-Demand format. Audio questions were removed, and questions with meaningless Facility Index rankings were removed to be replaced with original items. The once 57 item test became a 40 item, smartphone-friendly test. The same 40 item test from 2020 was administered again in 2021 to a cohort of 504. Four hundred eighty-one took the test, leaving 23 non-participants to be placed manually. A mean score of 51.24% was observed with a more or less normal bell curve. Students spread across eight departments need placement in level-appropriate, uniformly sized classes. Recent years have shown that score clustering occurred where classes needed dividing. Clusters refer to identical scores that group students into subgroups making line-drawing a subjective, time-consuming task. The trouble score clustering had to be addressed given the time constraints for announcing class memberships and being ready to answer allegations of unfair or capricious approach to class membership creation. In answer to this, the test items were re-weighed from a uniform weight of 1.00 to weights within a set range (1.00-easy to 1.09-difficult) to ensure greater score diversity and hence ease with student ranking. The 2020 40 Item test's Facility Index was used as a guide for setting the weights for the 2021 test. This paper will share the process undertaken to avert score clustering and enable class creation in an informed, principled manner, all within a matter of hours from data download with benefit to all concerned. © the authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.