Item Banking Insights from the Surpass Experts

Experts from the Surpass Team recently hosted an Item Banking Workshop which gave attendees the opportunity to discover and explore some of the advanced item banking functionality available in Surpass.

The session began with the panel answering some questions from the Community, and giving an overview of what to expect from their session, before attendees broke out into smaller groups for in-depth discussions and demonstrations on their chosen topics.

Watch the recording of the panel discussion and workshop summary here, and read on for an overview of the key topics that were discussed in this productive workshop.

Authoring and Item Types with Kat Murie, Surpass Trainer

Kat gives some useful tips for using Surpass features to organise the item bank, facilitating good authoring processes and practices. Kat demonstrates functionality such as:

• Using the customisable item folder structure to organise items in a way that suits you
• Utilising item sets to keep related items together, with time-saving features such as shared source material and tags to attach information to every item within the set
• Using the item history to understand what changes have been made to items and by who, particularly useful for collaborative working
• Ensuring only the correct team members can view and edit items at different workflow stages using roles and permissions

Management, Auditing and Performance with Emma Jarvis, Surpass Trainer

Emma answers questions about the effective management of items, covering topics such as:

• Using tags to attach metadata to items, for example, difficulty level or P Value, and organising tags into groups and categories to easily find the information you need
• Creating item lists based on tag values, or building tests by using tags in search parameters
• Different task types to facilitate the creation an review of items, including: Review tasks with voting and editing functionality; Authoring tasks for the creation of content; and standard setting tasks using the Angoff method to calculate the cut score

Integrity and Publishing with Chris Morrison, VP Product Development, Surpass

Chris talks about some timely topics as many working practices have had to adapt over the last year, including:

• Virtual working guidance, and how technology has been leveraged for item writing, review and standard setting practices
• Ensuring exam integrity in a virtual environment
• Considerations for using embedded images and videos
• Working with items for offline review, as we transition to potentially running in-person activites or a hybrid of in-person and virtual ways of working
• Instant editing and publishing in Surpass
• Publishing to third-party systems and the flexibility Surpass allows over delivery