Facilitating the Generation of Parametric Questions and their export to Moodle

Abstract

11The first author grants #2018/23561-1, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Online Education is becoming more and more disseminated in the present day, though it still has a hindrance concerning student assessment. This work presents a solution to create large Question Banks (QB) with parametric questions. This parametric question feature allows you to create more elaborate QB, where there are no duplicates of similar questions; Besides, it allows you to easily generate many variations when rendering an exam for a student. These QB are generated through an innovative solution adapted to the open-source web system MCTest. There one can settle the automatic production of numerous test variations that may even come in thousands. Then MCTest emails the QB to the user in two formats, Aiken and XML, which can be imported by another system, e.g. by Moodle for a quiz. For the second academic term of 2020 a Brazilian federal university decided to offer all of its courses in the distance learning format. One of them is called Networks and Communication (NC), which takes twelve weeks in total, and a professor is applying weekly quizzes on Moodle in order to prepare the students for the main exams. A total of 91 students of NC were assigned to this professor, 45 of them in the morning and 46 in the evening. He reported that the method presented in this article was very satisfactory to mitigate plagiarism, especially in online assessments.