Massification in universities: are assessment tools still reliable? a reflection from Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
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Date
2021-08-31
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Education and Practice
Abstract
A tremendous increase of the number of students in universities has been experienced by almost every country
all over the world including Tanzania. The Increasing number of students has greatly affected the instructors’
workload and general practices of student’s assessment and evaluation. This study aimed at determining the
reliability of the assessment tools at Sokoine University of Agriculture. Retrospective record review was done
on education undergraduate students who sat for an EDP 100 in 2014/2015, 2015/2016 and 2017/2018 academic
years where the course was selected through random procedures. A total of 214 scripts were systematically
randomly sampled from each cohort. The results revealed a drop in internal consistency of the scores obtained
from EDP 100 course across the three cohorts. Majority of the questions for the EDP 100 though were
moderately difficulty, their discrimination powers were poor. However, the variation in difficulty and
discrimination indices for the three cohorts was statistically not significant (p˃0.05 for MCQ and MIQ) except
the discrimination index for MIQ which shows significant variations (p˂0.05). It is therefore recommended that
similar studies should be done to determine both validity and reliability of the assessment tools for the other
subjects at the University.
Description
Journal article
Keywords
Massification, Internal consistency, Difficulty index, Discrimination index
Citation
DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-23-07