A Case Study on Students’ Opinions About Adaptive and Classical Tests

Assessment in education is an important task. Albeit being relatively old techniques, the adoption of adaptive (CAT) instead of classical testing (FIT) still poses several questions. According to the literature, a CAT test should be faster to complete, more precise in estimating the student’s ability, and more engaging to take than FIT. On the other hand, a FIT test should be easier to prepare and complete, and less prone to anxiety than CAT. In this context, the paper initially reports on a study conducted with students (that used CAT and FIT) about different aspects of their assessments’ experiences. The results show that students seem to prefer CAT, considered fairer, more practical and faster than FIT, independently of the different attitudes towards technology. Furthermore, students did not report more anxiety or more workload with CAT. Moreover, we also evaluate different methods to convert the ability measured with CAT into a grade, so to verify if the adopted method could have influenced the results of the questionnaire.