R/exams

An important challenge in lectures with many participants is to create sufficient examination materials with minor or major random variations. Be it as protection against cheating attempts in written exams or for the provision of individualised online quizzes or simply to use different versions of tasks in different exercise groups etc.

R/exams (http://www.R-exams.org/) is a software package designed to help lecturers meet this challenge. It allows its users to write assignments in simple text files that can optionally include different types of randomisation. These include a simple random draw from a set of predefined answers, the programming of calculation paths based on different initial values and the random generation of graphics or text blocks. R/exams can then generate a (very) large number of random variations of tasks and automatically translate these into different exam formats (e.g. as PDF or for OpenOlat). R/exams is thus called because it is implemented in the Open source statistics system R.

Tasks:

• Multiple choice
• Single choice
• Numerical
• text
• Combinations of several elements of all types

Examination formats:

• PDF: Either freely configurable or in a fixed format for multiple-choice questions (NOPS), which can be scanned and evaluated automatically.
• OpenOlat: Online exams, online tests and self-tests, optionally with large task pools, randomised draws, random order, time limits, etc.
• Particify: Live quizzes
• eExams: electronic exams in ZID computer rooms of the UIBK via OpenOlat
• Many other formats (Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, HTML, LOPS, ...)

Examples:

On the R/exams project page there are a number of Task examples, which illustrate some typical types of tasks with associated random mechanisms. Among others:

• Knowledge quizzes with random selection from a (large) set of multiple answers: capitals
• Maths tasks with random parameters: deriv
• Tasks for interpreting random variations of graphs: boxplots
• Cloze tests in which multiple maths problems or knowledge quizzes are combined: lm

Questions and support:

• R/exams @ Uni Innsbruck:
  OpenOlat course with information and examples for typical exam scenarios with R/exams at the University of Innsbruck. In particular, there is a forum for questions and support from the R/exams authors, the e-learning team and the community of colleagues at the university.
• R/exams general:
  For general questions and support about R/exams in general, the project offers its own forum and answers to questions on StackOverflow.