Question Usage and Difficulty

We have just released a new feature which should help you create better assignments in WebAssign.

Inside the Question Browser while selecting questions -- in either "Short" or "Full" View -- you'll now see two icons next to each question.

The left icon graphically indicates how many students have used that particular question within WebAssign. (10-100, 100-1000, etc).

You can hover your mouse over one of these icons to see the actual count, or click it to get more detailed information including how long the data for that question has been tracked.

The right icon indicates question difficulty. In coming up with this measure we first looked at many possible metrics, including the number of tries needed to get a question part right, the percentage that never got it right, the number of subparts, etc.

In the end, we determined that reporting simply the percentage of students who got the question right on their first try was a useful and generally accurate measure of question difficulty. The most difficult subpart of a question determines the overall question difficulty reported.

Again you can hover over or click the icon for more information; but in general the longer the red bar, the more difficult the question is.

We hope you enjoy this new information we're putting at your fingertips. Note that this feature is available for questions you have written, as well as textbook questions.

We already have plans to expand on this feature in the future; including the ability to filter questions based on some of these criteria ("only show me questions 100+ students have used"), and the ability to mark some questions as "favorites".

The WebAssign Team