Abstract:

This paper reports the results from an experiment examining how the order of questions in quizzes in introductory Financial Accounting courses affect student grades. Previous research found that accounting student’s performance is affected by the color of the paper in which the quiz is printed (Fordham and Hayes, 2008). In this study the quizzes include the same questions in different scrambled versions, and are classified according to their degree of difficulty using an index which considers the proportion of students who did not answer the question correctly and the placement of the question in the quiz. Results indicate that when students are given difficult questions first, their grades are significantly lower than when they are given easy questions first. No effect is found when the answers are scrambled instead of the questions. The result of this study shows that instructors need to be careful when grading exams and that in order to be fair, they should include this effect in their grading schema.

Keywords:

question order question difficulty scrambled versions.