this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Is it fair to give different students different wordings of the same questions? If one wording is more confusing than another could it impact their grade?
I had professors do different wordings for questions throughout college, I never encountered a professor or TA that wouldn’t clarify if asked, and, generally, the amount of confusing questions evened out across all of the versions, especially over a semester. They usually aren’t doing it to trick students, they just want to make it harder for one student to look at someone else’s test.
There is a risk of it negatively impacting students, but encouraging students to ask for clarification helps a ton.
My professors would randomize the order of the questions instead.
I have had professors that essentially create chiral A & B versions and also randomize the order. Never underestimate the amount of effort a lazy student will go through to cheat.
I use ChatGPT to create banks of questions that are aligned to the essential topics that I need students to learn. Then I randomly assign the same number of questions to each student from each essential topic. I give the students the list of topics to focus their studying on.
I also have other “categories” that form their final grade, things like participation and homework assignments. So any marginal unfairness that might result from randomized test questions is more that made up for over the course of everything I grade them on.
Sure it could but the same issue is present with one question. Some students will get the wording or find it easy others may not. Having a test in groups to limit cheating is very common and never led to any problems as far as my anecdotal evidence goes.
You’re increasingly the odds by changing the wording. I don’t see why it’s necessary. Just randomize the order of the questions would suffice.