Corrigendum: The Use of Subscores in Higher Education: When Is This Useful?

[This corrects the article on p. 305 in vol. 8, PMID: 28326049.].

The Use of Subscores in Higher Education: When Is This Useful?

Assessment in higher education is challenging because teachers face more students, with less contact time as compared to primary and secondary education. Therefore, teachers and management are often interested in efficient ways of giving students diagnostic feedback and providing information on the basis of subscores is one method that is often used in large-scale standardized testing. In this article we discuss some recent psychometric literature that warns against the use of subscores in addition to the use of total scores. We illustrate how the added value of subscores can be evaluated using two college exams: A multiple choice exam and a combined open-ended question and multiple choice exam; these formats are often used in higher education and represent cases in which using subscores may be informative. We discuss the implications of our findings for future classroom evaluation.

Introducing Computer-Based Testing in High-Stakes Exams in Higher Education: Results of a Field Experiment.

The introduction of computer-based testing in high-stakes examining in higher education is developing rather slowly due to institutional barriers (the need of extra facilities, ensuring test security) and teacher and student acceptance. From the existing literature it is unclear whether computer-based exams will result in similar results as paper-based exams and whether student acceptance can change as a result of administering computer-based exams. In this study, we compared results from a computer-based and paper-based exam in a sample of psychology students and found no differences in total scores across the two modes. Furthermore, we investigated student acceptance and change in acceptance of computer-based examining. After taking the computer-based exam, fifty percent of the students preferred paper-and-pencil exams over computer-based exams and about a quarter preferred a computer-based exam. We conclude that computer-based exam total scores are similar as paper-based exam scores, but that for the acceptance of high-stakes computer-based exams it is important that students practice and get familiar with this new mode of test administration.