[ale] Open Source Test Bank Oriented Test/Exam Generator

[Tom Freeman]

For what its worth - some of those ideas lacking sufficient time sound 
lovely. Would you be interested in a little financial aid to clone 
yourself??

On the way home from dropping off the girl friend the blue mush in 
the skull wondered off by itself. Dangerous that. Cutting to the chase - 
would it be a big nightmare to put something together for 1 semester 
courses using perhaps the layout engine of LibreOffice, a modest database 
engine, and scripting glue. Enter each question with the chapter & section 
numbers to use for selection at first - and randomly hit appropriate 
questions until the test is long enough. Randomize the order, add good 
looking headers and footers, and publish to any of a number of appropriate 
media/formats.

I know I'm missing an entire Omaha Beach landing zone worth of mines here, 
but is this vaguely feasable?

Of course the problem at the moment is finding somebody who _needs_ to 
scratch this particular itch for those of us who seem to lack the ability 
(me).

  On Fri, 5 Sep 2014, Jim Kinney wrote:

> I've been (very slowly) working on such a thing off and on for a while.
> It's nowhere ready for anything but a heavy coding session. I've looked at
> pdfexam (rather nice but relies on php which I don't like) and really not
> seen anything that's usable and open.
>
> I lost the link that has the common core grade/subject breakdown by code. I
> was planning to use that as a way to categorize the test questions (Teacher
> Sue wants 3rd grade earth science question set while teacher Joe wants 9th
> grade literature, etc). So far I have a raw schema for a few topics and
> even that's not usable yet. I _really_ want to displace that reader tool
> the schools all got suckered into - it only uses the books they sell, the
> questions are crap and schools can't add their own questions.
>
> a giant, 'no possible way any student can memorize all the questions and
> answers' test bank that's readily available for all teachers is needed.
>
> <sigh> So many ideas and so little time </sigh>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Tom Freeman <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> I've been futzing around for the past two weeks or so looking for
>> something that can maintain a test bank data base, generate and format at
>> least semiprofessionally random tests and quizzes, figure point values with
>> minimal hints, that an adjunct can afford to use and take to the next
>> school (I know adjuncts working 4 different schools at the same time - lets
>> not get close to licensing issues!) By vast desire, fully open source even
>> if they expect a minimal support fee.
>>
>> I've somewhat looked at "Respondus" (sp?), which appears to do everything
>> needed. And lisenced up the wazoo best I can figure (I can cheat on one
>> school I'm associated with but...) For the equivelent of 6 contact hours of
>> pay, there is a private lisence under Windows <<shudder>>
>>
>> Lets not talk about vendor supplied test generators or their free to use
>> while you use our book test bank. The test questions (at least for
>> chemistry) suck at near black hole intensities. There are nice things to
>> say about multiple guess - but I don't believe in lying to say them. In
>> fact, I hate them.
>>
>> (IF you wonder about US education, take a look at how dependent the
>> schools are on the textbook vendors for a possible large negative
>> influence. IMHO of course, and IANAL etc etc. But I'd love to see a
>> physicist/chemist/biologist apply the standards of their fields to
>> investigating the publishers.)
>>
>> Is there such a beast available (Exam generator, open source, good
>> formating at least - I can contribute test questions)? I'm suspecting not,
>> so do any of the list members associated with academia know of a resource
>> who might fall in love with creating such a thing? Windows is probably a
>> needed platform, but if it ain't Linux I for one will try to look further.
>>
>> I've had two supervisors tell me I'm writing pretty decent tests, but they
>> take too long to write in batches of 3-4 (one per section, one for outside
>> testing, and a space just in case). I need a better way, and I don't think
>> I'm alone in this.
>>
>> Thanks as always for a stimulating list, and the use of your bandwidth.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>
>
>
>
>