SPREADSHEETS AND LATEX – A PERFECT UNION FOR THE CREATION OF TESTBANKS FOR ONLINE ASSESSMENT

The current COVID-19 pandemic forced an instant shift in teaching from the traditional classrooms to an online format. While it was relatively easy to switch the teaching to online mode, the assessment process presents bigger challenges. Specifically, the assessment quality is compromised because during an online test, most students are able to seek help from their fellow test-takers as well as from different online sources. One way of discouraging the students’ tendency to share the answers among themselves is to inform them they will be given different questions than their peers. In this paper, we propose to use spreadsheets to create test questions in Latex format, thus making it easy to present each student with a ‘unique’ question-set during a test. The uniqueness of the testbank questions comes from randomly generated variable values in numerical questions. The spreadsheet also produces the answers to the questions to help automate the grading process. Such testbanks are suitable not only for normally sized courses, but also for the larger massive open online courses. We have successfully used such testbanks for multiple courses in our university’s Computer Engineering program. Originally, we had used the testbanks for in-class assessment. After the classes shifted online, we ported the testbanks to our learning management system to enable online assessment.