Is the undergraduate microbiology curriculum preparing students for careers in their field?: an assessment of biology majors’ conceptions of growth and control of microorganisms

International Journal of STEM Education

Table 4 Students’ (group 1—second year) rating of the difficulty of our three questions (% of responses)

	Question
	Suggest sterilization technique	Problem on growth curve	Comment on procedure followed by the doctor
Number of valid responses received	274	255	262
Difficulty level
Very easy	5.84	5.10	5.34
Easy	43.43	26.27	45.04
Neither easy nor difficult	42.70	41.18	41.98
Difficult	7.66	23.14	7.25
Very difficult	0.36	4.31	0.38