test: tools for evaluation of students' tests-a development experience

The purpose of the project that we describe in this paper is to provide teachers with efficient means of generating and scoring tests with multiple choice answers, inevitable in evaluating student's knowledge at massive examinations. The idea is to maintain a database containing classified test questions, together with precisely defined criteria for selecting questions for an exam. A particular test can be composed automatically, or semiautomatically with active participation of the teacher. The final test document is produced in multiple versions, which represent various permutations of questions and answers. For each version, an answer key is also produced, which is used by an automatic scoring tool, that supports arbitrary hand-held or flat-bed scanner, for scanning answer sheets. This paper describes a set of software tools that we developed, in order to provide teachers with the efficient assistance in this process, on the commonly available PCs running Windows.