Friday 31 August 2012

Testing times on Uniqurate

No, we're not having problems on the Uniqurate project, quite the opposite in fact - today's release adds test authoring. Sorry, I couldn't resist the headline :)


You will find that the button on the main menu to create a test is now enabled, and when used, you'll observe that the edit option changes to reflect that you have a test rather than a single question in memory.

Tests are divided into sections, and each section contains a number of questions. For the simplest use case, you can just leave all the default settings alone, click the Add question to section button a few times and select some questions. Give it a title, possibly fill in a bit of explanatory text that the student will see, and then save the test. Your work should then work in any delivery system compatible with QTI 2.1 tests.

However, Uniqurate does go a little further than that. You can have multiple sections in a test, and select random questions from the section so that no two deliveries of the test are the same. You can repeat a question within a section - useful if you want students to try several times with different randomised values (of course, this assumes that the question has randomised values!). You can even deliver different sections to the student depending on how they've done on the previous sections.

The test screen is a little busier than the question authoring screen, so when time permits we'll try and put together some documentation that talks people through the various options. In the meantime, however, the various little icons help scattered around the screen will pop up help about the option nearby.

Unfortunately, QTIWorks does not yet have tests up and running. JAssess should run tests fine, however, and as long as you avoid the maths components of UQ, the venerable MathAssessEngine should also run them too (although it does have a bit of a problem displaying the question feedback).

Meanwhile, people, as its author I hereby declare our old test authoring tool Spectatus officially obsolete! Awww. Please join me in a minute's silence for that worthy warhorse :-)

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