Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 451 de 957
Topic: Assessment 1 – Chair: Edith Gummer
Tool for automatic production and management of written and web test exams
Alberto González Téllez
agt@disca.upv.es
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia
Spain
José Miguel Valiente González
jvalient@disca.upv.es
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia
Spain
Abstract: Europe is nowadays making the transition to the unified European
education area following the Bologna guidelines. One of the most important ones
is continuous evaluation. In this context test exams are very convenient in order
to avoid lecturer work overload. This is due to the capability of automatic
production and correction of this exam type. In 2006 our university started the
operation of a learning management system named PoliformaT, which is a Sakai
customization. This platform gives a very powerful support for lecturers and
students, particularly it allows publishing auto-correction exams that can be
imported and exported in QTI 1.2 format. We do and extensive use of this feature
when computers are available for all students but we still rely on paper exams.
We present a tool to automatically correct test exams based on bubble mark
answer sheets as a first step to unify QTI and paper test exam production and
correction.
Introduction
Nowadays our university is starting the implementation of new curricula based on
Bologna guidelines for the unified European high education area. These guidelines are
based on three main issues: competence oriented education, student learning autonomy
and continuous evaluation. Our work is related to the last, but not least, point. Continuous
evaluation is important in order to involve students in the learning process and to permit
teachers getting an everyday feedback about how this process is going. The counterpart is
an increase in lecturer’s workload. We intend to minimize this drawback by developing
information technology tools that will leverage work impact of continuous evaluation.
A straight forward solution is using e-learning platforms support for student’s evaluation.
In fact our university started a learning management system (LMS) in 2006 based on Sakai
(Sakai, 2011). The LMS is named PoliformaT (Mengod, 2006) and it has a nice support for
exam management. Particularly it includes a QTI 1.2 (IMS, 2011) editor named Samigo
(Sakai, 2011b) that allows creating self corrected exams with several item types: one
choice, several choices, fill-in the blanks, etc. PoliformaT permits importing and exporting
QTI 1.2 compliant documents. Exams can be directly edited or they can be generated from
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011