Difficulty Index of Examinations and Their Relation to the Achievement of Programme Outcomes

Verifications on the achievement of programme outcomes in engineering programmes is a key requirement in the accreditation of such programmes. Various methods have been used to assess student's performance, for example, through assignments, tests, laboratory work, final examinations and group assignment. An issue that often arises is whether the assessment methods are actually testing the abilities of the students, in other words, whether the tasks or questions formulated are too easy or too difficult for academicians to ascertain whether students have achieved the stated programme outcomes. It will be necessary to verify the achievement through a quantitative and systematic assessment system. This paper reports a preliminary study on the assessment of the final examination questions of KJ4953 and KP4213 courses at the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia for determining the difficulty index of examinations and how the index can be related to the achievement of programme outcomes (PO). For both KJ4953 and KP4213 courses in the 2009/2010 session, it is found that all the exams questions are appropriate to measure the programme outcomes for both courses as it can be classified as moderate and too hard with regards to their difficulty levels.