I haven't always felt this way. I used to use test bank items on classroom assessments all the time. They do make your teaching life much, much easier. You teach your desired content, pull up an item bank chock full of pre-written questions constructed by someone the textbook publisher hired, pick and choose all of the questions that touched upon anything you mentioned during the unit (especially the ones that have cool charts, graphs, or diagrams associated with them), and sha-ZAM: a test is born.
Looking back on the error of my ways, there are several obvious problems with this method of test creation:
- Usually (and I know there are exceptions), test bank questions test lower-level thinking, and what you end up with is an assessment of basic recall skills concerning a useless jumble of information.
- Since these questions test to see if students can recall disconnected bits of information instead of synthesis, creation, and evaluation, "writing" tests in this fashion tends to make you pick LOTS of questions to cover anything and everything that was said or done in class. This results in a test that is way too long in addition to not assessing any upper-level thinking skills. (I know that sometimes item bank questions are labeled with the upper-level Bloom's verbs, but close examination of the kind of thought required to answer those questions makes these labels misleading.)
- Making a test that contains every possible question even related to what you talked about/had students do in class makes the assessment inherently invalid. Why? It probably doesn't assess the connections & concepts you really wanted students to make. Any assessment that does measure what it was supposed to measure is not valid.
- Many beginning teachers that I have mentored feel that MORE QUESTIONS = MORE RIGOROUS = BETTER FOR STUDENTS = I AM A BETTER TEACHER. In case you were wondering, this is not true, and never will be.
Perhaps you're asking yourself a different question right now. "If I shouldn't use the test bank questions, then what questions do I use?"
Use your own questions. Write your own questions. Don't be afraid to stumble and fumble. Don't be afraid to look up best practices on writing effective questions, or look up how to write questions that assess higher order thinking. Use meaningful questions. Use questions that assess what you want students to know; those critical understandings that you want your students to remember if they remember nothing else. Align your instruction with your assessments, and make them focused on your critical content and understandings.
I know it's work. I know teachers have a lot on their plates. But we need to do what's good for students, not just what's good for us.