1. Project Cleo: Students Reading the News
Gary Simpson
ABS270

2. Project Overview
Aim:
“To get students to read business stories in a quality newspaper and weekly news magazine”
Why:
To improve the standard of their English and knowledge of business
How:
A weekly news quiz for 4 weeks which contributes to the assessment of a core module.

3. What We Did
Students subscribed to daily newsfeeds from the FT and weekly from the Economist.
Each Monday we published a ten question quiz on the previous weeks news

4. An Example Quiz
Question’s where composed by a team to a standard format.
We generated between 20 and 30 questions per week.

5. What Went Wrong! Everything! Problems with access to FT articles
Problems with s from Economist
Problems with Internet Explorer
Problems with Chrome and Firefox
Complaints about the amount of reading
Complaints about language ability
Complaints about the time allowed to complete
Complaints about the penalties for taking over the 10 minutes
Almost nobody did the questionnaire on previous reading habits!

6. What Is Cheating? Sharing the questions with someone else.
Sharing the answers with someone else.
Googling the answers while doing the quiz.
Creating a word document in which you have the text of all the news stories which you search for key words from the questions.
Saying the internet crashed and asking for another go.

7. What We Learned
Lots of practical things about how to set the ground rules of online tests for summative assessment.
No resets but give best X of Y tests as mark.
Have strict penalties for going over time.
Make sure your questions assess the skill what you want.
Life is easier if it is formative assessment but only a minority will do it.
79 did not even look at example quiz
170 looked but did not attempt the questions
91 properly did the example
People complain if you stretch them.

8. What We Learned