A student of mine sent me this TED Talk saying, “Dr. Harsy this makes a good case for your mastery type exams!”
A student of mine sent me this TED Talk saying, “Dr. Harsy this makes a good case for your mastery type exams!”
Hi everyone, Amanda Harsy and Jessica OShaughnessy here to add a few thoughts on a variation of Mastery-Based Testing. Both of us have been using Mastery-based Testing in our courses over the last two years. Jessica uses MBT in Calculus I, Calculus II, and Introductory Statistics, while Amanda uses it in her Calculus II, III, and Real Analysis courses.
We usually have 16-18 concepts in our Mastery Exams and students can add to their exam grade by mastering these concepts. Now we have a choice: should we treat all the concepts as equal? That is, can students master any of the concepts to build their grade? In some courses, it may make sense to let the students choose.
But what if you feel that not all concepts are created equally? That is, are there some concepts you really think students should have grasped after taking a class?
Both of us use a slight modification in our mastery-based grading to address this belief. For example, since Calculus II is a sequential course, there are certain concepts we think all Calculus II students should master in order to be successful in Calculus III. We want students to successfully be able to differentiate transcendental functions, calculate area, and use integration by parts. In order to enforce these concepts, we have introduced “Core Concepts.” In Amanda’s Calculus II course, for example, these concepts include differentiation and integration of transcendental functions, L’Hopital’s Rule, Advanced Integration Techniques, Calculating Area, Calculating Volumes, and Interval of Convergence for Series. Students must master these 7 concepts in order to earn at least a C for their exam grade. Similarly, Jessica breaks her Calculus I classes into 16 topics and 7 core/required concepts. The students must master these 7 before any other questions count. If they do only these required concepts, they will receive a 70% as their test grade.
We both have a love/hate relationship with core concepts, which we tell students are “required” concepts. We’ll start with the love:
The cons (we will use cons instead of hate since we think hate is really too strong):
Overall, we both really like core concepts. This way, we can make our derivative questions hard enough that students will really show us they have mastered the concept without the ability to skip that concept because it is “too hard”. It allows students to be better prepared for their sequential courses and encourages them to review their old material. If you worry that students will skip some important ideas that won’t necessarily show up in other concepts because of the mastery-based system, this may be a good variation for you!