Difficulty index of a question paper: A new perspective

Assessment of learning reflects the performance of an academic system. In reality, this performance is the cumulative impact of learning in each course of the program. Hence on completion of delivering a course in terms different components, it becomes important to understand the outcome produced, the knowledge and skills acquired by the students. One of the primary component of course assessment is to look into the outcome of examinations in a course in total. In literature an attempt to interpret the performance of a question is available, in which the difficulty index for a question has been defined. However, a comprehensive look into the total question paper is essential. In this paper, an attempt is made to define a method that speaks of the complexity of a question paper as a whole. An attempt is also made to study the performance variation across the entire class of students as a function of difficulty by the application of proposed approach. The study is carried out by applying the proposed approach to continuous evaluation performance in two courses of undergraduate program in Computer Science & Engineering.