A comprehensive question retrieval application to serve classroom teachers

CTSS (Classroom Teacher Support System) was developed to aid teachers. The concept consists of retrieving questions according to specified attributes from a centralized data bank, assembling them into tests or exercises, and scoring student answers. Since scoring mark-sense answer sheets is a well-understood and widespread application, the emphasis was placed on solving systems problems related to producing lists of questions which meet the teacher's needs as he perceives them. To achieve this, the system permits items to be classified along several dimensions so that they can be selected by the computer according to criteria set by the teacher requesting a test. (The word "test" is used here to designate a list of questions, regardless of how it is to be used by the teacher who receives it.)