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You can access Question Analysis for a gradable item once a sufficient number of students have taken an assessment (assignments or tests) to generate statistics.  To do so, go to your Gradebook.  On the far right hand side of the test in question, open the three-dot options menu and select 'Question Analysis'.

You can also access this option from within the Course Content feed.



You will be brought to a window that displays the complete statistics for the test as it currently stands. If this space is blank or is providing no statistics, you may need to click "Rerun Report" to generate a fresh report that accounts for all current attempts. Depending on the length of your test, the generation of a fresh report may take some time; you will be notified via email when the report is complete and ready for viewing. You do not need to stay on this page while you wait. 




Each question is listed on the bottom with a number of statistics.  Two that are emphasized are Discrimination and Difficulty.

  • Discrimination is the correlation between getting the answer right and doing well on the test.  It ranges from -1 (doing well on the question means doing extremely poorly on the test) to 1 (getting the answer right yields a 100% on the test).  If all students got the question right or wrong, discrimination can’t be calculated.  Blackboard classifies the questions on the test based on 3 levels of discrimination:

    • Good Questions: questions with discrimination levels above 0.3

    • Fair Questions: questions with discrimination levels between 0.1 and 0.3

    • Poor Questions: questions with discrimination levels under 0.1

  • Difficulty is simply the percentage of students who got the question right (this is kind of counter-intuitive as a higher difficulty percentage means an easier question).  There are 3 levels of difficulty:

    • Easy Questions: difficulty greater than 80%

    • Medium Questions: difficulty between 30% and 80%

    • Hard Questions:  difficulty less than 30%


These statistics can also be downloaded into an Excel file for further analysis. 




(Note: This page also provides the option for you to return to the test and edit questions based on your findings from the item analysis. If this option is utilized, you will need to rerun the report to see how the edited and regraded questions affect the overall class statistics.)



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