Quizzes or Exams, Which one Should be More Challenging?
Shahryar Rahnamayan · Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) · 2010
Current experimental study targets the following fundamental question: Which exam is the optimal place to include challenging questions during the course assessment: quizzes, midterm exam(s), and/or final exam? The paper presents a comparative study which verifies that having harder quizzes during the semester helps students (a) to motivate them to improve their knowledge by earlier facing and tackling with challenging questions, (b) to have reasonable period of time to improve, with the minimum missed marks (less academic record damaging), (c) to achieve a higher mark for the course. Results and study procedure are provided for two courses, namely, Introduction to Programming and Software Design II courses.