The Iowa State Test and Evaluation Services is a relatively unknown service on campus, and it’s set up primarily to serve ISU professors.

Dorothy Lewis, associate director of the Computation Center, has worked at Test and Evaluation Services since 1977, but she said the service was in existence 15 years before then.

“The current system used was installed in 1979,” Lewis said.

Test and Evaluation Services provides “three basic services,” Lewis said.

The first is standard test scoring for the faculty. The center also does “analyses showing the student scores and statistics of exams as a whole and student evaluations at the end of a semester,” she said.

“Students score and rate their instructors on various aspects of their teaching,” Lewis said.

John Schafer, professor of agronomy, uses Test and Evaluation Services frequently for grading multiple-choice tests.

“When you’ve got a big class, it’s much more difficult to fairly evaluate short-answer discussion essays,” he said.

Lewis said the center also provides professors with sample tests. “The item banking portion of that is where we keep test questions on file and make sample tests [for professors],” she said.

Lewis said some professors pick questions out specifically, while other professors let the computers randomly pick out questions.

“We have two sets of questions, question banks, each with over 3,000 questions in them,” Schafer said.

“Since all the questions are categorized, this allows us, especially with multi-section courses, to ensure that each section has the same number of questions over each section and has the same types of questions.”

Lewis said Test and Evaluation Services also keeps student records.

Schafer said he always uses bubble sheets in introductory courses.

“When you get 200 students answering a question and grading an essay, it’s terribly difficult to grade them on the same standard,” he said.

Schafer said the content of the course he is teaching will affect the kind of test he gives. When teaching basic science courses, Schafer said he uses bubble sheets.

“But when I want the students to exercise judgment or make comparisons, then I want a different kind of question,” he said.

Schafer said the agronomy department works closely with Test and Evaluation Services.

“In several cases over the last 25 to 30 years, when they design something new, they experiment with us,” he said.

Lewis said Test and Evaluation Services are busiest during finals week.

“There is probably an excess of 30,000 sheets coming through that week,” she said.