[RUME] Calculus Gateway test

[Jose H. Giraldo]

I am looking information about calculus I gateway tests. I will give a
brief background.

With the purpose of making sure that our calculus I  students at TAMU-CC
have the computational tools they are supposed to get in calculus I, our
program decided to give a gateway test last semester. The gateway can be
taken up to  three times. The test has 10 questions and to pass the
student needs to score at least 8 correct. The student has 30 minutes to
answer the 10 questions. The test counts as 10% of the final grade. It
means that if a student does not pass, he/she can not get an A in the
class. Of course there are some faculty members who want to introduce the
rule that if they do not pass the student will fail the course (too tough
I think). BTW the questions are coming from a bank of 40 algebraic
expressions. The are asked to find dy/dx in each case. The questions are
available to the students about 4 weeks before the first attempt.

We decided to do it again this semester but want to improve it. The main
discussion is about the degree of difficulty of the questions, and how to
grade them. Some faculty want to ask simple questions to just test the
rules. Other faculty want more challenging questions to guarantee the
proficiency required in Calculus II.  For the grading part there is no
partial credit. It makes it harder to grade since sometimes the students
apply the differentiation rules correctly but make a mistake in the
simplification and that prevents them from getting credit.

I appreciate any input on this. If you are doing it and want to share your
experience/results, it would be great.

-- 
Jose H. Giraldo, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Mathematics Program Coordinator
Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
6300 Ocean Dr.
Corpus Crhisti, TX 78412-5825
Phone (361) 825 5827
Fax   (361) 825-2795