This study explores changes in assessment patterns in honors organic chemistry exams at the University of Cape Town. By adapting Bloom’s taxonomy, we developed a detailed workflow for coding exam questions in order to map cognitive distributions and reveal patterns in assessment focus over a 10-year period. Our findings show significant shifts in the balance of exam questions over the 2014–2024 period. Where the exams in 2014 and 2015 tended toward a blend of simpler Remember and Understand questions with more complex Create-type questions, in subsequent years there was a noticeable shift toward questions of intermediate complexity with a simultaneous reduction in the simpler recall questions. Interestingly, despite the changes in the distributions of the various question types, the 2024 exam was found to contain comparable higher-order content compared to the 2014 exam. In this way, both qualitative and quantitative inductive analysis offers a comprehensive perspective on assessment adaptations that can be used for reflective review of assessment practices.
Rylands et al. (Tue,) studied this question.