Test Banks

The usefulness and quality of publisher-provided test banks vary widely from predominantly recall questions to more useful inference questions and others higher up the Bloom taxonomy of cognitive questioning.

Advice from users includes the following:

	Even if the test bank software that comes from the publisher offers to build a random set of questions for your test, don't. Randomizing rarely strikes the right balance between in-class discussion and lecture, on the one hand, and textbook reading assignments, on the other.
	Select questions for yourself for a quiz or test.
	Try to determine if the questions have been class tested, by the textbook author or someone else.
	Supply a few questions from the test bank as samples with sample answers or rationales for the target answer and against the distracters.

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