I Love Me Some ExamView

I spent the last two days on school business building a set of common formative assessments in ExamView that are aligned to my department's skills list for our algebra and pre-algebra classes. Many of the questions are dynamic which means that for any given question type, multiple versions of the question can be created by the click of a button. As I was looking through the question banks, I realized that there were some skills that didn't have questions that fit what we will be trying to assess. Solution? Build it yourself.

The process is a bit tedious at first, but I was able to use previously made questions to figure out how to build a simple question regarding slope.

Step 1: Define your algorithms.

Step 2 : Create a graph using pre-defined variables.

Step 3: Define the distractors.

Yeah, gotta say I love this feature. Finding questions with good distractors is tough at best. But if you decide on an algorithm based on common misconceptions, you're good to go. In this problem, I d! ecided the common misconceptions for students calculating slop! e based on a graph were:

• Using Run/Rise instead of Rise/Run
• Confusing negative with positive slope
• Confusing the y-intercept with the slope

Of course, there may be some discussion on what the best misconceptions would be, but for the sake of practicing, those are what I went with.

Step 4: Decide how many of these type of question you want in your assessment.

I'm glad that I don't have to build all of these from scratch, but I like the fact that filling in the holes isn't too tough.

finding the vertex of a parabola