 No pain, no gain: The structure and consequences of question difficulty in a management accounting courseTimothy J. Fogarty and Paul M. Goldwater Journal of Accounting Education, 2024, vol. 68, issue C Abstract: An unrecognized choice made by accounting instructors is the degree of difficulty presented to students. Even if assessment is limited to multiple-choice materials, instructors can pick questions that vary from easy to very difficult. To do this, instructors depend on difficulty classifications provided by textbook authors and publishers. Using computer captured results from student efforts, this paper tests the integrity of these difficulty categories. This effort considers the impact of different grade consequences, different scoring systems, student aptitude and prior question exposure. The extent difficulty levels translate into student success variation is reported. The results generally support the publisher’s classifications. Nonetheless, interesting variations in the degree of these differences can be attributed to the context and consequences of question answering, as well as to the type of student asked to answer. Keywords: Accounting question difficulty; Accounting knowledge assessment; Partial credit scoring of multiple-choice questions; Student grade incentives; Student aptitude and motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joaced:v:68:y:2024:i:c:s0748575124000320 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaccedu.2024.100916 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Accounting Education is currently edited by Natalie Tatiana Churyk More articles in Journal of Accounting Education from Elsevier |
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