Validity, Reliability, and Accuracy Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Validity, Reliability, and Accuracy - Assignment Example This is essential not only to be fair to the student but also get an accurate representative of the class as a whole. In addition, writing such an assessment upfront will alleviate the potential for problems down the road. Students may, for example, become frustrated if an exam is perceived to be unfair. Much time may be spent after the exam with students questioning the very integrity of the assessment itself. In addition, if an exam does not properly test student comprehension about the given material, the teacher may reach a false assumption about the performance of the class, and thus their own teaching as well. With these aims in mind, the intent of this paper is to examine the validity and reliability of the hypothetical business management exam given in the preceding two pages. Validity When considering whether or not a teacher should be concerned over the poor performance shown by their students on a particular exam, one should first look at the assessment itself (Kubiszyn & Borich, 2013, p. 326). Exams need to be valid before their results can really be accepted. Simply because the class, on average, received a failing grade on an exam does not, in itself, indicate that they did not comprehend the material. Upon analyzing the exam, the teacher may discover certain problems with the test that make it invalid in the first place. It could well happen that the teacher re-writes a valid exam, gives it to the same set of students, and they all perform marvelously. For this reason, and others, the validity of any given assessment must be judged before any results on the part of the students are considered and recorded. One way to begin testing the validity of an exam is to consider the grade level of the material. If the exam is given to third... Validity, Reliability, and Accuracy When considering whether or not a teacher should be concerned over the poor performance shown by their students on a particular exam, one should first look at the assessment itself (Kubiszyn & Borich, 2013, p. 326). Exams need to be valid before their results can really be accepted. Simply because the class, on average, received a failing grade on an exam does not, in itself, indicate that they did not comprehend the material. According to Kubiszyn and Borich (2013), â€Å"The reliability of a test refers to the consistency with which it yields the same rank for individuals who take the test more than once† (p. 338). The indication here is that a student within a given class should rank in nearly the same place every time if the same exam is given to the same class. According to Kubiszyn and Borich (2013), â€Å"No test measures perfectly, and many tests fail to measure as well as we would like them to† (p. 348). The key is to realize that there will almost be some level of error in an exam, but the teacher must work hard to minimize that error to the greatest degree possible. Finally, there could be an error in scoring. This is particularly important to monitor if a human scores the exam. For this exam, the teacher can eliminate this error, to a great extent, by not scoring the exam when they are tired or in a rush. It is advisable to score an exam in batches, rather than all at once, to ensure that fatigue does no impact the marking of each response.