Most academic departments at Kirkwood use Questionmark Perception™, which the college has been using since 1998. The Learning Services department helps faculty to design tests, quizzes, exams, tutorials, and effective questions. Approximately 10,000 secure Perception tests are administered annually via Questionmark Secure at the main campus and the 12 learning centers.

The college uses a standardized placement test to assess new students' reading, writing, and mathematics skills to determine whether they should be placed in developmental or credit courses. But this testing does not address placement in discipline-specific courses where prerequisite knowledge is key to success.

So in the summer of 2006 Edwards' department helped a team of Biology faculty to create a placement test using Perception. Prerequisite knowledge in various topics, such as cell division, was organized in a topic structure in Perception. The team contributed questions to the online shared repository using the Word Authoring Template, browser-based authoring, or working directly in the shared repository. Existing questions in Word files were formatted for direct import into Perception. These question writing tools accommodated team members’ technical proficiency and personal schedules, making creation of the initial 200 test questions relatively quick and easy.

"We field tested the first version of the test with Biology students in fall 2006, eliminated nonperforming items, and then field tested again in spring and summer 2007," Edwards says. “We used the Item and Question Statistics reports to identify questions that did not meet difficulty, correlation, and discrimination criteria.” The team created two forms of the test, A and B, each with 40 questions. Students who did not obtain the cut score on Form A could attempt Form B. The two forms had to be equally difficult so that students would be placed properly regardless of which test they took. On a scale of 0 (the hardest questions) to 10 (the easiest), the questions on Form A had to be within 0.1 point on the difficulty scale compared with the questions on Form B.

Edwards says that these kinds of placement tests probably couldn't be created without Perception. "It would be really difficult, because Perception has so many features and tools to facilitate the whole process of developing an assessment," he says. “This is a great tool to create a placement test for any discipline."