The Effect of Scrambling Test Item on Students’ Performance and Difficulty Level of MCQs Test in a College of Medicine, KKU - Creative Education

CE > Vol.10 No.8, August 2019

Volume 10, Issue 8 (August 2019)

ISSN Print: 2151-4755 ISSN Online: 2151-4771

Google-based Impact Factor: 1.02 Citations h5-index & Ranking

The Effect of Scrambling Test Item on Students’ Performance and Difficulty Level of MCQs Test in a College of Medicine, KKU ()

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DOI: 10.4236/ce.2019.108130 428 Downloads 1,231 Views Citations

Author(s)

Ismail Satti¹, Bahaeldin Hassan^2*, Abdulaziz Alamri³, Muhammad Abid Khan³, Ayyub Patel⁴

Affiliation(s)

¹Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, College of Medicine, King Khalid University, Abha, KSA.
²Department of Medical Education and Obstetrics & Gynecology, College of Medicine, King Khalid University, Abha, KSA.
³Department of Medical Education, College of Medicine, King Khalid University, Abha, KSA.
⁴Department of Biochemistry and Medical Education, King Khalid University, Abha, KSA.

ABSTRACT

Background: Multiple Choice Tests (MCQs) are commonly used assessment tool in medical schools, which is delivered to our student in four versions (A, B, C and D) to avoid cheating. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of scrambling test items on students’ performance and the difficulty level of each version, so as to decide on continuing randomization of test items or keeping it without randomization. Methods: A prospective, cross-sectional study was conducted, the participants were the 5^th year undergraduate medical students during their major course of obstetrics and gynecology. Three tests where items were randomized are delivered to the students. After correction, the marks obtained by the candidates and difficulty index of each version were entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 and comparison amongst these four versions was carried out through analysis of variance (ANOVA). A p-value of <0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: No significant difference was found in the mean difficulty index for different versions in each test and there are no statistically different results when we compared version A mean students’ scores to other versions (B, C and D) after applying ANOVA analysis (F = 1.14, p = 0.42), (F = 0.75, p = 0.69) and (F = 1.29, p = 0.34); (F = 0.84, p = 0.62), (F = 0.81, p = 0.64) and (F = 0.62, p = 0.79); (F = 0.62, p = 0.79), (F = 0.35, p = 0.95) and (F = 0.83, p = 0.64) for test 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Conclusions: Our study revealed that randomization of MCQs test item into versions to avoid cheating does not affect student performance or the difficulty level of the exam.

KEYWORDS

MCQs Test, Scrambling, Version, Student’s Score, Difficulty Index

Share and Cite:

Satti, I. , Hassan, B. , Alamri, A. , Khan, M. and Patel, A. (2019) The Effect of Scrambling Test Item on Students’ Performance and Difficulty Level of MCQs Test in a College of Medicine, KKU. Creative Education, 10, 1813-1818. doi: 10.4236/ce.2019.108130.

Cited by

[1]	The Experimental Study of the Effect of Functional-Variational Factors on the Results of Linguistic Testing.
	Journal of Curriculum and Teaching, 2022

[2]	The Role of Order and Sequence of Options in Multiple-choice Questions for High-stakes Tests of English Language Proficiency
	2020

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