What is blueprinting for exams? – a closer look

Our market-leading eSystem exam software is designed to make exam creation as intuitive and streamlined as possible. In this blog post we’re taking a closer look at exam blueprinting and how it can benefit you when building exams.

What is exam blueprinting?

Blueprinting is a method used in creating exams that allows the administrator to check an exam meets the desired requirements. In essence, it enables you to verify that the exam is assessing a particular topic or learning objective at the appropriate level of difficulty. Providing confidence that the exams are fair and that all students are being assessed at the same level.

The importance of a good question bank

Before you can start thinking about blueprinting an exam, you’ll need to ensure that you have a good question bank. Speedwell’s eSystem makes this easy. Its advanced question bank allows questions to be allocated to as many groups, sub-groups, categories or learning outcomes as needed. Plus, the bank stores a complete history of each question or exam. And, by using the in-built statistical tools, it can provide performance insights too.

Investing the time up-front in creating a question bank with questions that are comprehensively categorised by topic, learning outcome, level of difficulty and so on will allow you to reap the benefits later on. And, without this it would not be possible to blueprint effectively.

Creating an exam blueprint

Once your question bank up is set up, it’s time to start building the exam. You can of course do this manually, but it takes time to trawl through questions individually and select the ones you need. Plus, it could become quite complex to keep track of where you are and what areas you still have left to cover.

This is where eSystem’s blueprinting tool comes in. Prior to creating the exam, you can set-up your blueprint. To do this you select the desired category and/or learning outcome.  Then within the blueprint, all questions appropriate to the selection, together with their level of difficulty are displayed.

It’s simple to add questions and once completed,  it provides a quick and easy visual check that the exam meets the required criteria.  As the below screenshot demonstrates:

Once you are happy with your selection you can save and the questions will be added to the exam.

You can blueprint several times to select questions with different criteria. And, once you have finished it’s also possible to blueprint the saved exam. Ideal for checking that the overall content meets with requirements.

Benefits of blueprinting exams

Having data available at any time as a visual check provides confidence that your exams are valid and robust. This could also prove useful should any exams be challenged.

However, perhaps the biggest benefit you’ll see using eSystem’s blueprinting tool is the time saving, freeing up your resources to focus on other areas.

Watch our video to see how easy it is to use the blueprinting tool within the eSystem.

If you would like to find out more about the eSystem, any of its features, or arrange a personal demonstration then contact us now. Call our sales team on +44 (0) 1223 851703 or email info@speedwellsoftware.com