Abstract-Any lecturer would agree that marking exams is the bane of her existence. A time-consuming and tiring process, it often requires complex, subjective judgments. Higher education exams typically take 3.0 hours. Do they really need to last so long? Can we justifiably reduce the number of questions on them? Shortening an exam by one hour, if justified, should result in a one-third reduction in lecturer time and effort spent marking. Surprisingly little empirical research has addressed these problems. Classical methods may be partly to blame for this dearth of studies. We propose an alternative methodology based on three key components including two recent developments in experimental design and statistics --synthetic experimental designs and equivalence hypothesis testing. The third component consists in comparing, on six psychometric criteria, student performance in a class on the standard 3.0-hr final exam with that on shortened exams with proportionately fewer questions. Two are the frequently misunderstood standard psychometric criteria -reliability and validity. We argue that adding four common-sense criteria -justifiability of test use, number of exam questions, equivalence in mean student performance, and correspondence (between shortened and full-length exam scores) -confer significant additional benefits. Our approach provides a simple methodology that lecturers can, with minimal time and effort, use to examine the effect of shortening exams for their own classes.Index Terms-Exam length, psychometric criteria, synthetic experimental designs, test length.
I. INTRODUCTIONMarking exams is the bane of any lecturer's existence. It is characteristically a tedious, time-consuming process. The intricate subjective judgments that are required can exhaust even the most dedicated of lecturers. Yet despite the almost universal loathing of lecturers for this activity, surprisingly little research has been published on ways to reduce the time and effort required to mark conventional written examinations. The purpose of the present study is to redress this long-standing neglect. In this paper, we are concerned with mixed-format exams used most commonly in academe and consisting of a mixture of different types of questions including problem solving (requiring detailed solutions), Manuscript received November 6, 2013; revised January 12, 2014 essay, short answer, and multiple choice questions.Written final examinations three hours or more in length are common in many universities and colleges around the world. Why then, if marking is so universally loathed, are exams so long (both in duration and number of questions posed)? Custom or tradition seems the primary reason [1]. Even more surprisingly, long exams have been retained despite dramatic increases in class sizes over the past couple of decades at most institutions of higher learning. Many lecturers complain of class sizes more than doubling in just the last 15-20 years [2]- [4]. In effect, marking time and effort for many lecturers has, at a minimum, effective...
