E-Learning at Universities: Does Starting with Difficult Questions Affect Student Performance?

Agata Galkiewicz, Jan Marcus and Thomas Siedler

No 55, Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers from Berlin School of Economics

Abstract: To reduce cheating in written tests and exams, assessors often randomly vary the order of questions across students. However, little is known about the potential unintended side effects of question order. This paper examines whether randomizing students to start with an easier or harder question makes a difference to overall assessment performance in incentivized testing situations under time pressure. Using data from more than 8,000 online tests and exams administered in econometrics and statistics courses at two of Germany's largest universities, we find no evidence that the difficulty of the first question(s) has an effect on overall assessment performance. Our findings are good news for people designing (online) assessments, because randomizing the order of questions can be used as an effective tool to mitigate cheating, but does not affect students' overall performance.

Keywords: education; university students; question order; randomization; e-learning; teaching of economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A22 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2024-11-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/files/5657/BSoE_DP_0055.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: E-Learning at Universities: Does Starting with Difficult Questions Affect Student Performance? (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdp:dpaper:0055

DOI: 10.48462/opus4-5657

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers from Berlin School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Reiter ().