It’s a pain to design statistics exercises each semester, and because students from previous share old exercises with the new incoming students, it’s hard to design simple exercises that students haven’t already seen the answers to. On top of that, some students try to cheat during the exam by looking over the shoulder of their neighbors. Homework exercises almost always involve collaboration even if you prohibit it.
It turns out that you can automate the generation of fixed-format exercises (with different numerical answers being required each time). You can also randomly select questions from a question bank you create yourself. And you can even create a unique question paper for each student in an exam, to make cheating between neighbors essentially impossible (even if they copy the correct answer to question 2 from a neighbor, they end up answering the wrong question on their own paper).
All this magic is made possible by the exams package in R. The documentation is of course comprehensive and there is a journal article explaining everything:
Achim Zeileis, Nikolaus Umlauf, Friedrich Leisch (2014). Flexible Generation of E-Learning Exams in R: Moodle Quizzes, OLAT Assessments, and Beyond. Journal of Statistical Software 58(1), 1-36. URL http://www.jstatsoft.org/v58/i01/.
I also use this package to deliver auto-graded exercises to students over datacamp.com. See here for the course I teach, and here for the datacamp exercises.
Here is a quick example to get people started on designing their own customized, automated exams. In my example below, there are several files you need.
1. The template files for your exam (what your exam or homework sheet will look like), and the solutions file. I provide two example files: test.tex and solutiontest.tex
2. The exercises or exam questions themselves: I provide two as examples. The first file is called pnorm1.Rnw. It’s an Sweave file, and it contains …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com