Re: IB Question Bank Physics V2
Atila Kalina
The Physics Classroom distributes a Question Bank to accompany The Physics Classroom website. With more than 9300 questions neatly organized according to topic, the Question Bank is the perfect tool for busy teachers. Even if you don't use the website with your classes, the Question Bank will assist you in quickly putting together quizzes, tests and other documents with high-quality questions that target student's conceptions of physics principles. And if you do use The Physics Classroom website, the Question Bank is the perfect complement to the materials found at the website.
The Question Bank contains several Microsoft Word files* that are neatly formatted and organized in folders with intuitive file and folder names. There are five different collections of questions. These collections are described on the Contents page. Additionally, the Question Bank contains more than 2000 image files that have been saved as .png files (portable network graphics). The image files are the images that are used in the more than 9300 questions.
The intended use of the Question Bank is to assist teachers in creating quizzes and tests. However, we can easily imagine many other uses of the question banks and the included image files. There will be teachers who will want to use some questions as discussion starters, as bell-ringer questions, as exit questions, and as homework questions. Other teachers will be thrilled by the more than 2000 image files that can be easily imported into PowerPoint presentations. Other teachers will want to include the questions on worksheets, review sheets, and homework assignments. And we hope that many teachers will be motivated to use the Question Bank as a starting point for organizing their own questions with ours so that they can begin to develop a useful bank of personalized questions for their courses. The possibilities of how to use the questions are nearly endless and only restricted by the licensing agreement discussed below.
The Microsoft Word application is not included as part of this product. To use the Question Bank, teachers must own a legal copy of Microsoft Word. To take full advantage of the Question Bank, teachers should have a basic understanding of how to use the Microsoft Word application. This understanding includes how to open, save, and create new documents and how to copy a portion of a document and paste that portion into another document at the desired location.
The Question Bank comes with a licensing agreement that permits the user the right to use the questions with their students and with other students in their own school. The questions can be used in any document or project that is distributed or viewable only by students of that school. The contents of the Question Bank cannot be posted in any location that can be viewed by the general public or by students and teachers from other schools. This prohibits the use of the questions on websites, CDs, and other storage media, and other projects that are not password protected from the wider population (e.g., students and teachers from other schools). Purchasers of the Question Bank are also prohibited from using the questions in any for-profit ventures.
The Physics Classroom believes that any teacher - from the seasoned veteran to the first-year teacher - would benefit from the use of this product. Whether you are looking to create a set of tests for a new course, rewrite the tests for an existing course, or prepare a collection of makeup tests, the Question Bank would facilitate any of these tasks. Whether you are a first year teacher, a first-time physics teacher crossing over from biology-, chemistry-, or math-teaching, or a veteran teacher whose been teaching since Newton's day, the Question Bank is likely to be of great benefit. Whether you're a busy teacher juggling a couple of coaching duties and activities with a full load of teaching and grading or simply wishing to save some time on writing tests, the Question Bank will be a much-appreciated time-saver.
If you have difficulty writing quizzes, tests, or exams or simply confront time restraints that limit your ability to create good quizzes, tests, or exams, then the Question Bank may be the solution to your predicament. Or if you are a new teacher or a crossover physics teacher, the Question Bank will provide you with a large sampling of questions that target conceptual understandings in physics. Or if you have an interest in creating a collection of multiple choice assessments that can be scanned and scored by an electronic scanner, the Question Bank will get your collection of assessments created quite quickly. Or if you are simply looking to expand upon your existing set of questions, the Question Bank will provide a rather rapid expansion.
Approximately 80% of the questions are forced-choice style questions. This includes true-false, multiple-choice, and multiple select questions. The remaining questions involve a calculation with a numerical response, a written statement, the completion of a sentence, or the construction of a diagram or graph. As for topics addressed by the question banks, it's worth taking a look at the Contents page.
To be honest, there are some redundancies. Those familiar with the Minds On Physics program know that each assignment in the collection of modules consist of as many as 40 questions. These questions are grouped into sets of two to four questions with questions in each group being very similar to one another. Additionally, a small percentage of the questions in MOP will show up in the other collections. When they do reappear in other collections, they are often reworded or reduced to five options to make them useable with electronic scanning forms. Despite these minor redundancies, The Physics Classroom is confident that users of the Question Bank will have plenty of questions to choose from.
That's a great question and one you should give consideration to before purchasing the Question Bank. We anticipate that users of this product may have a wide range of versions of Microsoft Word. As such, we have saved every test bank in two different file formats - a file format for older versions (named as fileNameO.doc) and a file format for more current versions (named as fileNameC.docx).
The Physics Classroom will not ship the Question Bank to students or parents and will not refund the full amount of the purchase price if purchased by students or parents using the PayPal option. We do ask for means of validating that the purchaser is a teacher or school (hone number, school email, school address, etc.) and we do check before shipping. The Questoin Bank is strictly a for-teacher offering.
The Question Bank can be easily purchased using the Buy Now button on our website. You have two options - you can purchase the CD version of the Question Bank or you can purchase the Digital Download version. The contents are the same for each option. Only the delivery option is different. For both options, payments are collected via a secure PayPal portal. You do not need to have a PayPal account in order to purchase this product. You can pay be debit card, credit card, or via a PayPal account. In all instances, the payments are processed through PayPal.
The following is a review and comparison of the available online question banks for the Core Exam.1Not included are the various casebook series such as A Core Review which overlap as well and are discussed in this post. More detailed and generate thoughts on approaching the Core Exam are here.
Because RadPrimer is free for many if not most residents and is big, the other resources have an upward climb to be worth your time and money. I was able to secure reader discounts for BoardVitals and RadsQuestions.
Verdict: BV has all the trappings. Software and product are much better than FTC or RTB. In 2016, I gave FTC an edge on question content, but recent consensus has been that BV is the strongest content-wise compared with the other choices. Qevlar has some neat software tricks and is cheap, but BV has the stronger questions if you want to pay a bit more.
Verdict: Great value and worth a go due to its software, usability, and overall quality. Questions are a bit patchy and certainly not inclusive but great for getting into Core mode and an easy choice (along with Physics 300) for studying on the go.
Question Quality: Overall, the good FTC questions are really solid. They definitely retain the feel of the real deal and do by far the best job of integrating physics. Given the number of irritating gotcha questions, I think integrated physics may even be the true highlight of the product. The quality control is a bit off, and I think there are probably more truly bad questions than Qevlar. FTC also has the most typos and other such issues than any product except Rock The Boards. The practice exams are both just compilations of their highest-rated questions in other sections, so they make for nice self-assessments.
Design & Software: Software is busted. Images appear as warped thumbnails and must be clicked on to enlarge. No tutor mode, must finish a section to read answers/explanations. You can submit feedback on a per-question basis, which is nice. Feedback responses are prompt, though I got the distinct impression the RTB staff got tired of me pointing out their mistakes.
Question Quality: Overall decent questions. Clearly a product of recent residents. Explanations are super thin (incorrect answers are rarely explained) and contain a noticeable number of errors. Also lots of typos. Combination of inadequate explanations and black pearls demonstrates a serious lack of polish.
I want to do Radprimer and one other qbank, and I was going to go with Qevlar but your most recent reply to a comment makes me think maybe I should do Board Vitals? Do you have any new insight into whether Qevlar or BV is better? Thanks!
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