Andrew's IB Maths Vault

Hello hoomans. My long-time readers may have noticed that I tend to take all of us on a tangent every so often. And today happens to be one of those days.   If you hang out with me on the IB Discord server this is not the first time I babble on designing and writing examinations. You know how happy I am to talk about these nerdy things. I wrote two posts on how I write exams, which you could find here and here . Today we’ll take a crucial aspect – question difficulty – and dive deeper into what makes up the difficulty of a question.   This is my attempt to distill some of the research I’ve read in a more user-friendly, digestible way. Perhaps not the most accurate but hopefully they serve as a checklist for question writers to be cognizant of when they’re writing questions for a mock exam.   Note that this does NOT apply to formative assessments; the purpose is different and therefore you shouldn’t apply what’s written here word by word. And if you’re no...

Hello everyone!   Today’s post will deviate from the usual blogposts on the website, as it’ll be targeted at teachers and fellow tutors. I’m sure students can still benefit from this, but this post is written with teachers in mind.   We’ll discuss two main systems – numerical (raw) marks vs marking at the question level as a whole. This may sound confusing but it’ll make sense when you finish reading the post.   A brief rundown of the two systems   Numerical marks converted to final grade This is the most common method. A-level, IB, Scottish qualifications, it’s not hard to list systems that opt for this option.   Each exam has a fixed number of raw marks. Students take the exam, teachers mark each question and tally up the final raw mark.   The overall performance is not determined until the awarding process takes place.   Marking at the question level The biggest example of this is New Zealand’s NCEA system, fi...

  This is the second post of the series. In part 1  we discussed the prep work required to produce what I deem to be a reasonable exam paper at the level that the students are expected to achieve. Today we’ll focus on writing the actual questions and assembling them to form a complete paper. Hey there! Back with a second post on this. It’s been over a week since I first sat down and write, and since I’m not in the mood to do schoolwork it’s a good idea to just grab a coffee and share my thoughts. Throughout this rambling, ER refers to examiners’ reports, NOT emergency rooms. Even though I have read numerous papers about the theory behind assessment design and awarding process, I’m still a newbie when it comes to producing valid assessment tools. As outlined in part 1, I’m writing the papers on my own from my experience interacting with IB students as well as looking at what other exam boards are doing, and another person – ideally a subject specialist (shoutout to RShi...

Hey there! This post will be slightly different from what you've been accustomed to for the last month or so, specifically targeted at folks who want to start writing exams. But first off, I have a disclaimer: this is simply my two cents in writing assessments. The real process of exam writing is a lot more complex and involved, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect one or a couple people following the same process for a mock exam – it’s simply overkill. The two parts of “how I write assessments” only describe the process that I follow when writing assessments and that’s IT. If you want to take some bits and pieces here and integrate them in your own practice, that’s lovely, but I’m not saying that my method is the best on Earth. As you already know, I love writing assessments. It isn't news to many readers here – besides that I’m very happy to see y’all using my tests to prepare for your internals, I enjoy the process of writing tests. They don’t always have to be fo...