Authoring Tools for Electronic Examinations

I'm going to put a little more detail into each of the steps in electronic examinations workflow I wrote about last week. So this week I'm discussing exam authoring.

The authoring tool should allow examiners, at a minimum, to create questions, edit existing questions, store their questions in a question bank. Also create an exam, add questions to an exam, and then schedule the exam.

Creating and Editing Questions

To create or edit a question you’ll provide a question title, the question stimulus e.g. Which of the following statements about aspirin antiplatelet effect is true? The correct answer or answers and how they are scored really depends on the question type. One of the more common question types in medical and veterinary education is the multiple choice question (MCQ), so I’ll use that for all my examples in this post. So for MCQs you’ll also provide the distractors, then flag and score the correct answer. The exact scoring is up to the examiner.

Question Banks

Questions can be saved to a question bank or repository, question banks can be shared or private. Shared obviously allows for team collaboration on examinations. They can also be stored on the local hard drive or in a shared online database. Some tools give the option of creating a repository on both, some don’t. It’s really depends on the authoring client I suppose. Web based tools won’t have access to the local hardware, for example.

Exam Creation

To create an exam the authoring tool should allow the following. The exam needs a title, I’d suggest using the subject and the type of exam and the semester: Gross Anatomy Spring Midterm 2011 for example. Obviously you’ll need to add questions, and they can either come from your question bank or by creating the questions as a sub-task of exam creation. You’ll need to set a passing grade for the exam, as well as scheduling a time and date for the exam to become available.

Extra Features

Some nice additionals to electronic exams can include setting a time limit, once the student has reached the time limit their exam is automatically submitted for them. Randomizing question order, so the same exam is presented to students in a different order, this can reduce academic dishonesty by making it difficult to copy somebody else’s answers. Some tools allow for question distractors to be presented in a random order as well, giving the same advantages. Messages can be set to be displayed at the start and end of the exam, such as instructions for the exam at the start and potential feedback at the end. Exam scheduling may also be set when authoring or may be managed by an administration tool once the exam has been created.