Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area has introduced different changes such as continuous assessment and an educational system that emphasizes student-oriented learning activities such as team work, pair work or individual research tasks. One way to implement continuous assessment is to perform several tests throughout the course, just after having finished each topic discussed. Among the options for these evaluation tests the multiple-choice test is useful and practical for both teachers and students. One disadvantage of doing these frequent tests has to do with the large number of students. However, the possibility that students copy among them is almost impossible.
In this paper we present a software tool that will allow us to build a parametric item bank to manage custom choice tests. With the adjective “parametric” we mean that each item or question (stem and options) depends on several parameters to take different values that allow us to make many versions of the same question depending on the number of students we will examine. In this line, we will have a set of conceptually equal but numerically different exams. Each of these tests will have a number assigned, which will assist teachers at the time of marking them. Exam number k, for instance, should be marked following the solution column k, which is created during the exam-creation process by the application.

Keywords:

Continuous assesment, multiple choice, R, Miktex.