~Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
~Rakhi Maheshwari, M.A, B.Ed, Noida, India
It is a free answer kind of test. In this case the examinees or the students have the responsibility of thinking out the answers to the questions asked. They have the freedom to express or state the answers in their own words. It is used by teachers to measure achievement, performance etc from classroom instruction. The answers to such questions which the learners are confronted differ in quality and degree of correctness.
The Distinctive Features of Essay Test
These are:
i. Students answer small number of questions. Because of time limits, It is not always possible that all the topics be covered by the tests.
ii. The script are written in the students own style, words and usually in his own handwriting.
iii. The students are considerably free to organize their own answers. This implies that answers with varying degrees of accuracy and completeness.
Types of Essay Questions
C.C. Weidemann (1933, 1941) identified ten types of essay question which he arranged in order from simple to complex. These questions begin with
- what, who, when, which, and where
- list
- outline
- describe
- contrast
- compare
- discuss
- develop
- summarize
- evaluate
Ordinarily it is undesirable to start with the words in (1) and (2) because they require simple verbal associations which can be more easily tested with objective items (Thorndike and Hagen, 1960, p. 80). It is also generally undesirable to begin an essay question with discuss when the question fails to provide a basis for or the klimitations or focus of the discussion.
Types of Essay type test
Essay questions are classified into two types namely the restricted response type and the extended response type. The classification is based on the degree of freedom of response associated with the question. For instance, an essay question may require just a few short sentences as answer as in the short-answers objective item where a sentence or two could be all that is required. Whereas, another essay question may give the examinees complete freedom in making their responses and their answers may require several pages. However, there are variations in freedom of response that fall within these extreme conditions
Extended Response or Free Response Type of Essay Test
These are responses to essay questions in which the examinee is only restricted by time as no bound is placed as regards the dept, breadth and the organization of the response. In response to such a question the examinee demonstrates his ability to select and recall the facts which he thinks are pertinent, organize and present his ideas in a logical and coherent form. This freedom to decide which facts the thinks is most pertinent to select his own method of organization and to write as much as seems necessary for a comprehensive answer tends to reveal the ability to evaluate ideas, relate them, coherently and to express them succinctly. In addition, they expose the individual differences in attitudes, values and creative ability.
This type of essay item is mostly useful in measuring learning outcomes at the higher cognitive levels of educational objectives such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation levels. Although, the extended response essay type are also limited by two weaknesses which are:
ü They are insufficient for measuring knowledge of factual materials because they call for extensive details in selected content area at a time.
ü Scoring such responses is usually difficult and unreliable since the examinees have free will in the array of factual information of varying degree of correctness, coherence and expression. These limitations are minimized in the Restricted Response Type.
Examples of free response or Extended responses questions
- Describe the sampling technique used in research studies.
- Explain the various ways of preventing accident in a school workshop or laboratory.
- What are the implications of fuel price hike in our economy?
- Why should the classroom teacher state his instructional objectives to cover the three domains of educational objectives.
Restricted – Response Type
In this type, the questions are so structured that the students are limited, the scope of the response is defined and restricted. The answers given are to some extent controlled.
In this type the examinee is limited to the nature, length or organization of response to be made. The items are directional questions and are aimed at the desired responses. This limits the examinee freedom to select, recall, and synthesize all that he knows and to present them logically as he may wish. This type of essay item is most useful in
measuring learning outcomes at the lower cognitive levels of educational objectives, that is, knowledge, comprehension and application levels
The restricted nature of the expected response in this type of items makes it more efficient for measuring knowledge of factual material. It reduces to a reasonable extent the difficulty of scoring and encourages more reliability in scoring. However, the restriction makes it less effective as a measure of ability to select, organize and integrate ideas and present them in an original and coherent form which is one of the major advantages of essay test.
Examples of Restricted Response Essay Questions
- Give three advantages and two disadvantages of essay tests.
- State four uses of tests in education.
- Describe four sources of energy.
- Define Helix and give two applications of helix.
Kinds of Essay Type Test
The ability to write effectively is undoubtedly one of the critical skills that everyone has to acquire during school and later in college years. The kinds of essays that are most commonly given to students include: expository essay, persuasive essay, informal essay, the review, research essay, literary essay, expository essay, expository essay, compare and contrast essay.
The Expository Essay
The main function of the expository essay is to explain, or to acquaint your reader with something; it can be used to describe, explain or present some information. In order to write an expository essay, preparation and background research will be required. Expository writing will also requires to show the understanding of the chosen topic. In their most common form, expository essays will take about 5 paragraphs; however, classes and instructors may require them to be larger in size. No matter the size, an essay should at all times include an introduction and a conclusion – the body length may vary.
The Persuasive Essay
With this type of writing you will need not only to prove your point, but will also have to persuade your opposition that your viewpoint is logical and well founded, and thus – better. In this case, you are no longer merely showing what you know; you are convincing the reader that you are correct in your viewpoint. In order to write this kind of essay it is important to prepare in advance by choosing a side, making a case for it, anticipating alternative arguments and finding ways how to refute them.
The Informal Essay
The informal essay is a type of essay written mainly for enjoyment. A good informal essay has a relaxed style but retains a strong structure, though the structure may be less rigid than a formal paper. The informal essay tends to be more personal than the formal, even though both may express subjective opinions. In a formal essay the writer is in a silent presence behind the words, while in an informal essay the writer is speaking directly to the reader in a conversational manner.
The Review
A review may be either formal or informal, depending on the context. Its goal is to evaluate a specific piece, perhaps a novel or movie. This implies that the reviewer’s personal opinion plays a significant role in the process The formality of the review will be determined by how much of the essay is analysis, how much is summary, and how much is your reaction to the work you are reviewing. A more formal review will not only discuss the work or its own merits but will also place it in context.
The Research Essay
Writing a research paper involves going to source material and synthesizing what you learned from it with your own ideas. You must find texts on the subject and use them to support the topic you have been given to explore. Since it is easy to become lost in a wilderness of outside material, you must take particular care in narrowing your topic.
The Literary Essay
A literary essay focuses on such elements as structure, character, theme, style, tone, and subtext. You are taking a piece of writing and trying to discover how and why it is put together the way that it is. You must adopt a viewpoint on the work in question and show how the details of the work support your viewpoint.
A literary essay may be your own interpretation, based only on your reading of the piece, or it may be a mixture of your opinions and references to the criticism of others, much like a research paper.
The Cause and Effect Essay
The cause and effect essay includes some elements of writing that might be considered more professional than those a descriptive or narrative essay might include. It is very important, for instance, that your tone be reasonable, and that your presentation be factual and believable. Sources are often required in a cause/effect paper, and your choice of these sources is important as they reflect on the validity of your paper. Additionally, the first-person point of view does not work; you should sound objective and impartial. The purpose of a cause and effect paper is to be as convincing as possible, and to convince readers to accept the cause/effect as fact.
The Comparison and Contrast Essays
This kind of writing requires the writer to be an observer; in most cases it doesn’t require scholarly research or any specific referencing. Such essays are mostly subjective in nature, and writers are required to come up with differences or similarities they are able to point out and analyze. There are different compare and contrast patterns for these essays, yet the overall essay structure remains invariable: there should be an introduction, a few body paragraphs and a conclusion
Constructing the Essay Questions
An essay test is a useful measurement instrument only to the extent that it is constructed, administered and scored to ensure a high level of objectivity. For this reason, essay test items should consist of items that will ensure the same understanding and elicit only the skill or ability one is interested in measuring from every examinee.
The following points are suggested as guide for construction of good essay test items.
i. Essay questions are to be used only when it’s desirable and very adequate for measuring the learning outcomes for full realization of learner’s achievement. In other words, they are to be used for questions that call for complex learning outcomes that pertain to the organization, integration and expression of ideas which would not have been possible without the use of essay test items
ii. Formulation of questions that call forth the behaviour specified in the learning outcomes. Essay questions should be designed to elicit only the skill which the item was intended to measure. This can be achieved by expressing clearly and precisely the question in line with clearly defined instructional objective. In addition, an action verb like compare, contrast, illustrates, differentiates, criticized and so on could be used to give the test items more focus.
iii. Phrase each question to clearly indicate the examinees task. An essay question has to be precise . Ensure that the examinee’s task is clearly indicated by delimiting the area covered by the item, using descriptive words to give specific direction towards the desired response. Indicate the score allotted to the test. This suggestion easily lend itself to restricted response type and care should be taken not to narrow the questions when constructing the extended response type in order not to reduce it’s effectiveness as a measuring of the ability to select, organize and integrate ideas.
iv. Adapt the length and complexity of the answer to the examinees’’ level of maturity.
v. Indication of approximate time limit for each question. It is necessary to indicate time allotted to each question to enable the examinee to pace their writing on each question and to allay any anxiety that might arise.
vi. Avoid the use of optional questions because, optional questions might influence the validity of test results
vii. It is also not easy to construct essay questions of the same difficulty level. Hence,
making valid comparisons of performance among them especially for norm reference setting will not be possible.
When to use Essay Questions
v Use essay questions in the measurement of complexachievement when its distinctive feature of freedom of response is required. Learners are free to select, relate and present ideas in their own words. This freedom enhances the value of essay questions as a measure of complex achievement but it leads to scoring difficulties that make them insufficient as measure of factual knowledge.
v Essay questions should also be used to measure those learning outcomes that cannot be measured by objective test items. The specific features of essay questions can be utilized most fully when their shortcomings are offset by the need for such measurement.
v Essay questions should be used when learning outcomes concerned with the abilities to select, organize, integrate, relate, and evaluate ideas require the freedom of response and the originality provided by essay questions .More so, when these outcomes are of such great educational significance that the expenditure of energy in the difficulty and time-consuming task of evaluating the answers can be easily justified.
Advantages of Essay test
The essay test has got some advantages in the area of measurement and evaluation. Some of these advantages are:-
i. The essay test permits a freedom of response, which in turn allows the students to prevent their ideas as detailed as they choose so as to show how deep knowledge they have in the subject area covered by the question.
ii. The free response form allows the student to express himself in his own words making use of his proficiency in the language being used to his advantage.
iii. Essay tests promotes the development of problem – solving skills. This is because the student has to think out the answer himself and put it down in organized form.
iv. It helps students to improve their writing skills such as writing speed, legibility etc because they write in their handwriting.
v. It encourages creativity by allowing their own unique way. It discourages guess-work and encourages good study habits in students.
vi· It measures complex learning outcomes that cannot be measured by other means. For instance, it has the ability to measure learner’s communication skills
vii. It measures the learner’s ability to produce an answer, synthesize and organize ideas and present them readably in a logical and coherent form.
viii· It also enables the measurement of organizational and divergent thinking skills by laying emphasis on the integration and application of thinking and problem solving skills, creativity and originality.
ix· It is very applicable for measuring learning outcomes at the higher levels of educational objectives such as application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation of levels of the cognitive domain.
x· It is easy and economical to administer. It can be easily and conveniently written on the chalkboard because of the few items involved. This saves materials and time for production.
xi· Essay item is easy to construct and does not take much time
xii· It can be used to measure in-depth knowledge especially in a restricted subject matter area.
xiii· It does not encourage guessing and cheating during testing.
Limitations of the essay test
Despite the advantages already listed for essay test, it does not satisfy some important qualities of a good measuring instrument.
They include that:
1-They also have poor psychometric quality or measurement qualities although popular among classroom teachers especially those who are deficient in the skill required for item construction.
2· It is inadequate in sampling subject matter content and course objectives since it provides limited sampling. The provision of few questions results in the invalid and narrow coverage of subject matter and instructional objectives.
3- Fewness of the number of questions often asked encourages permutation of some content areas and creaming of ideal responses to suspected questions. In this regard, essay questions discourage the development of good study habit.
4· In addition to the invalidity of the measurement, evaluating the answers to carelessly developed questions tends to be confusing and time consuming task. This results in poor reliability in scoring.
5-Studies have shown that answers to essay questions are scored differently by different teachers and that even same teachers score the answers differently at different times.
6-· Sometimes an essay question implies many skills other than that which the item was intended to measure. The examinee therefore perceives and reacts to the same questions differently. The differences in the perception of the questions encourage bluffing and hides differences in the knowledge of basic factual material and the learners ability to use and organize such facts.
7- The essay test item does not readily lend itself to empirical study of item qualities like difficulty and discrimination based on which improvements on the item could be made.
8-Scoring is not reliable because different examiners can grade the score answer differently. In fact, the same examiner can grade the same question differently at different times.
9-. Grading of essay tests is time-consuming.
10-. Essay questions do not cover the course content and the objectives as comprehensively as possible.
11. Good command of language places individual students at an advantage while poor command places some students at a disadvantage.
How To Make Essay Test Less Subjective
As subjectivity is a major limitation of the essay tests. It can be reduce to the barest minimum after following these tips.
i. Avoid open-ended questions.
ii. Let the students’ answer the same questions. Avoid options/choices.
iii. Use students’ numbers instead of their names, to conceal their identity.
iv. Score all the answers to each question for all students at a time.
v. Do not allow score on one question to influence you while marking the next. Always rearrange the papers before you mark.
vi. Do not allow your feelings or emotions to influence your marking.
vii. Avoid distractions when marking
Scoring Essay Test
Essay test scoring calls for higher degrees of competence, and ordinarily takes considerably more time, than the scoring of objective tests. In addition to this, essay test scoring presents two special problems. The first is that of providing a basis for judgment that is sufficiently definite, and of sufficiently general validity, to give the scores assigned by a particular reader some objective meaning. To be useful, his scores should not represent purely subjective opinions and personal biases that equally competent readers might or might not share. The second problem is that of discounting irrelevant factors, such as quality of handwriting, verbal fluency, or gamesmanship, in appealing to the scorer’s interests and biases. The reader’s scores should reflect unbiased estimates of the essential achievements of the examinee.
One means of improving objectivity and relevancy in scoring essay tests is to prepare an ideal answer to each essay question and to base the scoring on relations between examinee answers and the ideal answer. Another is to defer assignment of scores until the examinee answers have been sorted and resorted into three to nine sets at different levels of quality. Scoring the test question by question through the entire set of papers, rather than paper by paper (marking all questions on one paper before considering the next) improves the accuracy of scoring. If several scorers will be marking the same questions in a set of papers, it is usually helpful to plan a training and practice session in which the scorers mark the same papers, compare their marks and strive to reach a common basis for marking.
The construction and scoring of essay questions are interrelated processes that require attention if a valid and reliable measure of achievement is to be obtained. In the essay test the examiner is an active part of the measurement instrument. Therefore, the viabilities within and between examiners affect the resulting score of examinee. This variability is a source of error, which affects the reliability of essay test if not adequately controlled. Hence, for the essay test result to serve useful purpose as valid measurement instrument conscious effort is made to score the test objectively by using appropriate methods to minimize the effort of personal biases and idiosyncrasies on the resulting scores; and applying standards to ensure that only relevant factors indicated in the course objectives.
The Point or Analytic Method
In this method each answer is compared with already prepared ideal marking scheme (scoring key) and marks are assigned according to the adequacy of the answer. When used conscientiously, the analytic method provides a means for maintaining uniformity in scoring between scorers and between scripts, thus improving the reliability of the scoring.
This method is generally used satisfactorily to score Restricted Response Questions. This is made possible by the limited number of characteristics elicited by a single answer, which thus defines the degree of quality precisely enough to assign point values to them. It is also possible to identify the particular weakness or strength of each examinee with analytic scoring. Nevertheless, it is desirable to rate each aspect of the item separately. This has the advantage of providing greater objectivity, which increases the diagnostic value of the result.
The Global/Holistic of Rating Method
In this method the examiner first sorts the response into categories of varying quality based on his general or global impression on reading the response. The standard of quality helps to establish a relative scale, which forms the basis for ranking responses from those with the poorest quality response to those that have the highest quality response. Usually between five and ten categories are used with the rating method with each of the piles representing the degree of quality and determines the credit to be assigned. For example, where five categories are used, and the responses are awarded five letter grades: A, B, C, D and E. The responses are sorted into the five categories.
This method is ideal for the extended response questions where relative judgments are made (no exact numerical scores) concerning the relevance of ideas, organization of the material and similar qualities evaluated in answers to extended response questions. Using this method requires a lot of skill and time in determining the standard response for each quality category. It is desirable to rate each characteristic separately. This provides for greater objectivity and increases the diagnostic value of the results.
The following are procedures for scoring essay questions objectively to enhance reliability.
i. Prepare the marking scheme or ideal answer or outline of expected answer immediately after constructing the test items and indicate how marks are to be awarded for each section of the expected response.
ii. Use the scoring method that is most appropriate for the test item. That is, use either the analytic or global method as appropriate to the requirements of the test item.
iii. Decide how to handle factors that are irrelevant to the learning outcomes being measured. These factors may include legibility of handwriting, spelling, sentence structure, punctuation and neatness. These factors should be controlled when judging the content of the answers. Also decide in advance how to handle the inclusion of irrelevant materials (uncalled for responses).
iv. Score only one item in all the scripts at a time. This helps to control the “halo” effect in scoring.
v. Evaluate the answers to responses anonymously without knowledge of the examinee whose script you are scoring. This helps in controlling bias in scoring the essay questions.
vi. Evaluate the marking scheme (scoring key) before actual scoring by scoring a random sample of examinees actual responses. This provides a general idea of the quality of the response to be expected and might call for a revision of the scoring key before commencing actual scoring.
vii. Make comments during the scoring of each essay item. These comments act as feedback to examinees and a source of remediation to both examinees and examiners.
viii. Obtain two or more independent ratings if important decisions are to be based on the results. The result of the different scorers should be compared and rating moderated to reflect the discrepancies for more reliable results.