Dad's album

My sister, Beth, and I have been working on an album for my Dad. He keeps joking that if we don't hurry up, he'll be dead before we finish it. He has no idea how true that is. It's one of those things: just as soon as you think you've finished it, you come up with just one more page to do.

This is our sister, Susan doing her page. She's actually more of a scrapbooker than she thinks she is. She made a scrapbook of one of the trips the orchestra she's in did and I think it is wonderful. This is her doing her page for Dad's album. You can just see me on the other side of the table. We have this set up in the living room at Mum & Dad's place so that we can work on the album and spend time with them. It has actually worked out very well. Everyone who comes to visit gets a chance to see the process and many of them put in their 2 cents worth.

Dad is hale and hearty at the moment. As you can see from this picture, he is looking pretty good. His little brother came over from Canberra and told him "you're a fraud. You're not sick, you're just seeking attention!" (in the kindest possible way).

This is a picture I asked him to pose for last week. The card he is holding in his hand is one of thousands that we have in the garage. From about 1974 to 1994, Dad was the Chief Examiner for the Biology exam for getting into University. In the pre-computer age, he needed an efficient and cheap way to keep track of exam questions. These cards are about 20cm x 10cm and have punched holes around the edge - just large enough for a size 10 knitting needle.

The idea is that each card has the question printed on the front. Then along the top of the card, the first choice option is for which section of the accompanying text the question relates to. There is a choice option for whether the question is Multiple Choice, Short Answer or Essay, then there is a sub-section choice and a section for how the student must answer the question (display Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis or Evaluation), as you want a balance of these.

The idea was, he made his first choice (which section), insert the knitting needle into the first slot, then shake the stack of cards. The ones which fell out where all the questions relating to that section. Then he inserted the knitting needle into the question type (for example, Multiple Choice), shake the stack out and the ones left were the multiple choice. Then insert the knitting needle into the sub-section and shake (you get the idea now) and that gave you possible questions. He'd then insert the knitting needle into, say, the Knowledge slot, shake them out and that would give him all the questions in that Section, that were Multiple Choice, in a particular sub-section that would require the student to demonstrate Knowledge. It was actually quiet an ingenious system. He never translated it to computer, because the time that it would have taken to write such a database and then enter in all the data would have simply taken too long.

But by going through this process year, he could turn up to a paper-setting meeting with possible questions already determined. He could also keep track of which years the questions went into to make sure that they weren't repeated too often (as current students get past papers to practice on) and later on, he also recorded other data about how well the question had performed which would allow him to modify or replace bad questions.

Really quite clever when you think about it.