Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. I'd like to clarify a few points regarding the design and intent of the quiz questions.

Firstly, the phrasing of the questions is intentional and accurate. When a question states "select one or more" or "select all true," it means exactly that – there may be one correct answer or there may be multiple. It is up to the student to determine the correct number based on their understanding of the material. If this sort of question proves confusing, that may indicate a need for a student to clarify their understanding of the concepts we've looked at. Usually, discussing them in labs with one of the lab facilitators is the best way to do this.

Secondly, one of the things that many test questions assess – not just CITS5501 questions, but test questions in general – is the ability to distinguish relevant information from distractions. In fact, when we do long-form English questions, you'll see that this is explicitly part of the marking scheme: "identifying relevant facts" is part of the rubric. Some questions may include extraneous details or options that are not correct. This is a common practice to challenge students and differentiate levels of understanding.

Regarding your suggestion to adjust the marking criteria to account for partially correct selections, I appreciate your input, but the current rubric is designed to reward a full and accurate understanding of the material. Selecting an incorrect option, even when accompanied by a correct one, indicates a misunderstanding and is marked accordingly.

I'll also point out that for many questions, the incorrect options are not just wrong, but impossible. As an example, the lecture slides define a failure as a type of behaviour. If a question points to a behaviour (e.g. the system crashing) and asks you to identify it, you'll know that any answer which is something other than a behaviour is wrong.

I hope this helps clarify the rationale behind the quiz design. If you have any other queries about the assessment design, you're welcome to email me in person, or raise them at the next Student-Staff Liaison meeting, which will be announced on csse-feedback.

Cheers,

Arran

ANONYMOUS wrote:

Hi Arran,

I wanted to share some feedback regarding the quiz. I noticed that some questions have very misleading instructions. For instance, many questions state, "select one or more" or "select all true," but in reality, there is only one correct answer to these questions. On the other hand, there are questions with no indication of how many answers to select, yet the correct answers are multiple.

Due to these misleading instructions, I selected additional options I wasn’t sure about for questions with instructions to select one or more. However, this resulted in a 0 mark even when I had selected the correct option. I hope that future exams won’t have such misleading prompts.

Suppose the misleading instructions are intended to increase the quiz's difficulty. In that case, the marking criteria should reflect this by awarding points for the partially correct selections without wrong selections. I believe this would be a fairer way to allocate points for questions where it’s unclear how many correct answers there are. At the very least, it would prevent me from having to select uncertain options.

Thank you for considering my suggestion.