KARACHI, Aug 6: Speakers at a seminar on Saturday stressed the need for adopting valid and reliable standards of examination for uplifting the educational quality in universities.

They called for understanding the content validity and reliability of exams so that the stability of a system leading to evaluation of intellectual abilities, comprehension, logical thinking and problems solving by students could be ensured.

The seminar on “Examination Standards” was organized by the Quality Enhancement Cell and Department of Physiology, University of Karachi. The objective was to provide a platform for awareness on examination standards.

Speaking as chief guest, the KU Vice-Chancellor, Dr Pirzada Qasim, said it was high time to reassess the existing examination system in universities and bring meaningful changes in it.

The defined and essential components of examinations should be implemented sincerely, with all spirit and needed enforcement, he added.

He noted that despite efforts of years, there did not emerge standards in examinations for which lack of training of teachers in designing question papers and assessment of scripts could be cited as the main reason.

The standards of examinations should be redefined and implemented uniformly in universities of the country.

In a key note address, Prof Asif Hashmi, Controller of Examinations of the Lahore University of Health Sciences, said exams should be aimed at enabling students to obtain feedback on learning and help them improve their performance.

On the other hand, exams helped teachers decide whether a student passed or failed. It also helps evaluate the effectives of teaching and the teachers, he added.

He suggested that any improvement in the educational system could be ensured only when knowledge-based students were sent out from educational institutions. He said that teaching and examination standards went side by side.

He said that institutions should ensure that the principles, procedures and processes of assessment were explicit and reliable.

Mr Hashmi said that institutions should also implement effective, clear and consistent policies in respect of the selection procedures, powers and accountability of assessors and examiners.

Clear rules and regulations governing the conduct of assessment should also be published, he added.

The coordinator of the seminar and Chairman of the KU Physiology department, Prof M Abdul Azeem, said the students’ feedback was missing on examinations, while post-examination analysis was never done by content experts.

He said examination was a process of gathering information to assist in the evaluation of students’ knowledge and skills, and universities in general sought to follow a mixed method of assessment, as appropriate to the nature of individual courses.

He mentioned that two important qualities of a standardized examination were reliability and validity, which represented precision in examination. “The validity is to obtain the results intended, while reliability means the stability and repeatability,” he said.

The Dean of Engineering Faculty of Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Prof Muhammad Ibrahim Pathan, said examination standards depended on the examination system, which needed to be objective oriented and based on the realistic approach.

Dr Shakeel Farooqui of KU said multiple choice questions (MCQs) were regarded as one of the most appropriate and efficient mechanism for assessing students’ cognitive knowledge, but at the same time such (MCQs) examinations appeared to fail in objective tracking of the student’s performance in certain circumstances.

Dr Shamim Akhtar and Shagufta Afaq of Karachi University, Bushra Sheikh of the University of Sindh, Prof S M Iqbal of HEC also made their presentations at the seminar.