E-Learning at Universities: Does Starting with Difficult Questions Affect Student Performance?

Abstract

"To reduce cheating in written tests and exams, assessors often randomly vary theorder of questions across students. However, little is known about the potential unintended side effects of question order. This paper examines whether randomizingstudents to start with an easier or harder question makes a difference to overall assessment performance in incentivized testing situations under time pressure. Usingdata from more than 8,000 online tests and exams administered in econometricsand statistics courses at two of Germany’s largest universities, we find no evidencethat the difficulty of the first question(s) has an effect on overall assessment performance. Randomizing the order of questions can be used as an effective tool to mitigate cheating but does not affect students’ overall performance." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku, © University of Chicago Press) ((en))

Cite article

Galkiewicz, A., Marcus, J. & Siedler, T. (2026): E-Learning at Universities: Does Starting with Difficult Questions Affect Student Performance? In: Journal of Human Capital, Vol. 20, No. 3, p. 1-33. DOI:10.1086/741540