Creating Quizzes

I've just spent three hours creating a 20-point quiz for my Intro to GLBT Studies course. Why, you ask? Here's the story:

The students and I meet today in cyberspace instead of on campus. We agreed to all be together in the course "Chat" from 1:15-2:15 p.m. In preparation for that synchronous chat, they are to have read a chapter called "Historical Explanations and Rationalizations for Transgenderism" by Gordene Olga Mackenzie, a terrifically interesting 27-page article about the (mostly German and American) theories about transsexualism, transvestitism, and transgenderism from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. Since it's such a comprehensive article, names and dates figure prominently, something I don't always stress in my courses because I never remembered well in my own schooling. But students seem to like having the fixed certainty of a name/date association, so I often include a few such questions on quizzes, especially open-book quizzes like this one.

But just which names and dates will choose? The most important, you say - easy answer, right. But is Alfred Kinsey more "important" than D.O. Cauldwell, the first American medical doctor to use the term "Transsexual" in the medical literature? (It was 1949, the year after Kinsey used the term in his opus The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male). Is Richard Krafft-Ebing more"important" than Walter Williams, the anthropologist who attemped to introduce the term "amazon" as the female equivalent of "berdache"? (It still hasn't caught on, and I hear "berdache" used by all kinds of contemporary GLBTQ scholars when they talk about any "two-spirited" Native Americans.)

In these two cases, I've made the judgment call: Kinsey and Krafft-Ebing are on the quiz (they contrast nicely, having opposing scientific motivations: one progressive, one conservative), and Cauldwell and Williams are not. I can defend this choice, of course, but the point I'm making here is that thinking through selections such as these makes quiz creating a time-consuming process.

I haven't even mentioned how hard it is to craft good questions! Questions that elicit the answers you want from students while simultaneously not giving those answers away. (That metaphorical construction is interesting, isn't it?) Wording is crucial, especially with multiple-choice questions, the kind I use most often for online quizzes (although rarely in f2f classrooms) because they allow both teaching and testing at the same time (that is if you provide a good series of choices - my daughter has been great at helping me craft these choices because she's a good guesser, one who sees patterns in the teacher's multiple-choice answers and uses them to guess).

Anyway, the point here is that the whole process has taken me three hours: to re-read the chapter, mark important passages, construct fair questions, eliminate redundancies, clarify ambiguous wording, and finally type all these questions into the clunky software interface we have (selecting the correct "properties" and "restrictions" and "display options" so that students get meaningful information on their end). Whew!