Milestones

Milestone exams are a collection of multiple short-answer questions that have four main characteristics:

• Aimed at low-cognitive level: The questions that make up this type of assessment are typically low-cognitive, that is, mostly memorization or direct application. This allows students to master the necessary low-cognitive skills and prepare better for the open-ended, problem solving written exams.
• Online: Milestones are taken online, and since questions are mostly multiple choice or fill in the blanks they are automatically graded. Therefore, it decreases the significative grading workload.
• Grades follow the so called “specifications grading” or the elimination of partial credit: In order to make clear to students how important it is to excel at these low cognitive level, they are graded on A/C/F basis. This means that scores below 75% they get a zero, scores between 75 and 85% they get a 80%, and scores above 85% obtain a 100%. In other words, even if a student makes some mistakes they can still obtain full credit, but it penalizes scores that otherwise would just “pile up” as partial credit but that reflect not having achieved a learning “milestone”.
• Complete transparency: These questions are not kept secret from students. In fact, the homework are a collection of milestone questions. If the task for students is to memorize or practice those specific questions, they should be practiced as much as possible. This fact has also allowed us to finally align homework and assessment. In the past, we had seen a discrepancy between homework performance and exam performance, to the point that some students would deceive themselves by thinking that they were well prepared for exams because they obtained a good grade in homework (which probably was solved in groups or with extra help).
• Cumulative: The key for milestones is that half of the questions come from previous milestones. A true learning milestone is aiming at long-term memory, therefore, students must be exposed to the same questions repeatedly. Ideally, this cumulative should happen not only within one course but throughout the entire chemistry curriculum.

Example from CHEM1331 http://chem.r.umn.edu/chem1331/milestones/

Example from CHEM2333 http://chem.r.umn.edu/chem2333/milestones/