Bachelor of Science Degree in Urban Land Administration
- Introduction
The Ministry of Education of Ethiopia has announced the implementation of exit exam for all
undergraduate program students (public and private), beginning with the 2022/2023 academic
year, in order to improve the quality of graduates produced by higher learning institutions. The
exit exam aimed at checking whether students have acquired the required knowledge, skills
and attitudes or not. To implement this, it requires determining competency areas for a specific
program, which is already completed. Based on the competency areas prepared, it needs to plan
the construction of tests.
Planning of a test is a first and vital step in the construction of an achievement test. An
achievement test demands very systematic and careful planning, as a fact that good planning is
a symbol of success. Tests are the tools that provide scores that measure level of student
learning and study program learning outcomes. In order to achieve the valid and reliable
measurement of student learning and program learning outcomes, the development of valid and
reliable test is the mandatory. Test should be able to measure student performance in all
dimensions of knowledge, skill and attitude. The carefully planned test construction contributes
to improve the overall quality of the test in terms of test content validity, difficulty level,
discrimination power and test reliability.
Test preparation is not an easy task; it requires a careful planning and guideline to make the
task simple. Test construction needs the preparation of test blue print. Test blueprint is defined
as a complete plan that explains how to develop a test. The term refers to a map or specification
of assessment to ensure that all aspects of the curriculum and educational domains are covered
by the assessment programs over a specified period of time. It helps curriculum developers/test
constructors to match various competencies with the course content and the appropriate
modality of assessment.
Generally, test blueprint will help to ensure tests: 1) Appropriately assess the achievement of
instructional objectives of the course; 2) Appropriately reflect key course goals, objectives and
the material learned or covered during the instruction period; and 3) Include the appropriate
item formats along with the knowledge and skills being assessed.
Keeping this in mind, the team has prepared this test blueprint document in order to help the
test developers or content specialists in their process of valid and reliable test construction. The
major points considered in the process of preparing this test blue print guideline were the core
competencies that have been already identified for the themes of courses, the course contents,
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course credit hours, and the learning outcomes with their corresponding levels of achievement
by learning domains. In line with these, the number of test items that should adequately assess
the performance of students in all the content topics will be determined through discussion with
the content specialists who construct the blueprint and test for their corresponding study
program.
Therefore, the main purpose of this manual is to give direction on how to develop blueprint for
content specialists so that they can develop a test blueprint for their respective program. - Objective of test blueprint
Test blueprint preparation is generally opted to assist the preparation of a test that is
representative, broadly sampled, and consisting of complete knowledge domain expected of
the Ethiopian higher education students on completion of their study program. The specific
objectives of test blueprint are to:
- Facilitate the construction of a representative and balanced test items for the
selected courses in accordance with the competencies identified. - Guide test developers or writers to write or set appropriate test items.
- Steps to develop test blueprint
a. Listing the identified core competencies corresponding to the respective course
b. Listing the specific and minimum competencies to be assessed by the exam
c. Listing out the major learned course contents corresponding to these listed minimum
competencies.
d. Listing the specific, measurable learning outcomes under these minimum
competencies using action verbs (Note: the number and the importance of these
learning outcomes proportionally contribute to the total test items. The weight of the
categories of the list of learning outcomes under each competencies and contents
should lead to the number of total test items to be constructed)
e. Determination of the test format
f. Content weighting – Experts judge the weight to be given to the listed learning
outcomes and their corresponding contents.
g. Identifying the categories of learning domains to which each of these learning
outcomes belongs using their action verbs.
h. Construction of test blueprint table
i. Allocating the number of test items for each learning outcomes by their corresponding
types and levels of learning domains.
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j. Determination of the sub-total and total test items by their categories of learning
domains and learning outcomes. - Issues to consider in test blueprint preparation
a. Curriculum details
b. Course outlines/guidebook details, lists of learning outcomes, lecture notes,
textbooks, and other curricular materials
c. Course contents pertinent to the respective learning outcomes
d. Time devoted to cover the content with in a course (course credit hour)
e. Total test length (i.e., total number of test items)
f. Number of questions allocated to each content area using the proportion calculated
g. Weight for each item
h. Relevance of the content to students’ future career
In addition to these, following the template mentioned below will help to prepare the
blueprint. - Required documents to prepare the test blueprint
To prepare a test blueprint, we need to have the following documents in our hand. - Identified core competencies of the program
- Curriculum of the program
- Expected Profile of the Graduates
Graduates of Urban Land Administration would find a market in governmental, nongovernmental, and private organizations dealing with the issues related to land management.
Some of the working organizations are: federal urban planning institute; Ministry of Urban
Development and Construction; Land Administration and Use Authorities, Addis Ababa Land
Development and Management Bureau, State and Federal legislative organs and
municipalities, Real Estate Development Companies as well as Technical and vocational
training institutions.
They can also work as researchers, graduate assistants, and land use policy development
experts. Moreover, graduates can engage as private service provider or entrepreneur, such as
project consultants in Land Administration and Urban Planning.
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Producing skilled and competent manpower for the national and international market in urban
land administration and planning - Specific Objectives
- Producing skilled and competent manpower for the national and international market
- Assessing students’ educational achievement in major areas of Land resource
management and planning - Ensuring whether the graduation profile of Urban Land Administration curriculum have
achieved at least common standards of knowledge, skills, and attitude - Improving public and industrial trust and confidence in land use planning and
management activities of professionals - Facilitating the efforts of students to revise the core learning outcomes of the courses
covered by the exit examination - Ensuring all graduates from HEIs satisfy the requirements of the labor market and
employability through the national wide implementation of competency-based exit
examination - Creating competitive spirit among concerned institutions in Ethiopia with the strives to
encouraging them to give due attention to the national standards
- Themes and list of courses
Based on the identified competency focus areas, all the courses of Urban land administration
program with exclusion of freshman courses are categorized here under five themes or focus
areas, which are: - Basics of land administration and planning
- GIS and Remote Sensing
- Surveying Technology and Cadastral Mapping
- Property valuation
- Land and property law
