As always, the team has been working tirelessly to help you create better assessments with Cirrus. This year, we have already released the powerful re-marking functionality, keycode log in, the Turnitin plagiarism integration, and started rolling out the new table component. And we have even more to come before the year ends! In the last release of the year, we will close with the following:
- Huge improvements to the candidate review functionality: The candidate review functionality allows you to schedule a review session where candidates can view the results within a set timespan. This is extremely useful if you wish to give candidates the opportunity to view their results in a controlled environment, while protecting your exam content from leaking out.
- Several important quality of life improvements like:
- The ability to view candidate results by candidate – rather than only by assessment and schedule.
- The coordinator can download preliminary results while the marking process is still ongoing.
And we still have many exciting things in store for 2023! So what is next?
New library table component
We have recently introduced the new table component, which makes it much easier to manage your content. So far, we have introduced it in the new results screen and in remarking, and the upcoming candidate review will also include the new table component.
When we looked at where this new table component might benefit our users the most, we concluded that it would significantly enhance item banking. Many of our customers have item banks containing thousands of questions, and organising these in a good way leads to significant time-savings. We will therefore implement the new table component for your Cirrus item banks during Q1 2023.
In short, it will improve Cirrus by providing:
- A new and uniform way of filtering, searching and organising content.
- The possibility to customise tables by hiding/showing columns.
- Enhanced performance with large item banks
Psychometric data
Psychometric data will be an essential part of our product strategy in 2023 and onwards. As you know, psychometric data in Cirrus (like the Chance score, Rir and Rit values, etc.) allows you to measure the performance of your individual items and entire assessments.
Psychometric data provides authors with empirical evidence of the quality of their content. On the most basic level, this helps you ensure that the exams you deliver are consistent in terms of difficulty level, knowledge and/or skills measured, etc.
On a more advanced level, psychometric data could help you take your online assessments to the next level: Delivering completely random (and therefore secure) exams on demand, anytime and anywhere. Sound interesting? Stay tuned for our webinar on this topic in February!
Angoff scores
But the improvements don’t stop there: We will also introduce support for Angoff values. Setting Angoff values allows you to set a pre-determined P-value, which is an indication of question difficulty – hard (a lot of candidates answered it incorrectly) or easy (a lot of candidates answered it correctly).
Initially, the P-value is set by a panel of experts. Later, when items have been exposed to candidates, the system starts generating actual data that can be compared with the predetermined value.
Angoff is a proven method for setting the cut score. One of the neatest benefits is that the Angoff score determines the difficulty of exam content by solely focusing on the exam content to determine the standard test-takers’ performance. Straightforward when appropriately used, it is an effortless way to standardise exams. Speaking of Angoff scores – we happen to be writing a blog about it (because of course we are!). Keep an eye on our News page…
