AMC in the age of covid

Added by Juani Mela over 4 years ago

I was wondering if this community is using AMC to write tests that are different for each student, now that we have to grade online.

In a group discussion with some colleagues we decided that online tests were better, although asking for a handwritten+scanned exam gives some extra trust.
But moodle is nowhere close to the flexibility of AMC.
Not even numbas is close. For instance, questions can be selected from a pool at random, but there is no guarantee that the exam will be balanced, which is so simple with AMC.

Anyway, AMC is viable, and I've used it with good results. The parameterized corrections were very helpful both for the students and for me, when I had to grade.

But maybe using PDF forms as in https://project.auto-multiple-choice.net/boards/2/topics/2492 would make more sense...

I'd love to know your thoughts about this.

Regards


Replies (5)

RE: AMC in the age of covid - Added by Juani Mela over 4 years ago

Export to moodle would be awesome, and looks doable (there is precedent in the latex package named "moodle" [1]). For instance, generate a fixed pool of N exams, then make a moodle quiz that simply chooses one exam for each student. Thus AMC does all the random generation, creating a balanced exam with a detailed solution, and moodle keeps the student list and records the answers.

Grading is not important, it can be done in a spreadsheet. Recording the test that each student went through and the answer to each individual question is essential, because they have a right to revisit their exam. I mention this because numbas, embedded in moodle as a SCORM module, provides grading, but it is extremely hard to retrieve the information needed for an exam revision.

Regards

[1] http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/moodle/moodle.pdf

RE: AMC in the age of covid - Added by Manuel Sch over 4 years ago

I think the easiest thing is to have fillable PDFs as shown in [1]. Then the students simply get the PDF file, click the buttons they want to select, save the PDF and finally hand it in online. So we don't have to change anything in terms of grading etc. simply need to somehow send out the PDFs to every student.

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/14842/creating-fillable-pdfs

RE: AMC in the age of covid - Added by Manuel Sch over 4 years ago

Oh and I just figured it is already implemented. You simply need to import automultiplechoice with the pdfform option:

\usepackage[pdfform]{automultiplechoice}

RE: AMC in the age of covid - Added by Juani Mela over 4 years ago

Wonderful!

We were looking for something like this, we thought it would require some research.

There is a very thin mention in the english documentation:

pdfform: create a pdf file to fill

But it "works as expected"^TM. I have filled the pdf with evince and okular, and the pdfform is not pretty, but both work just fine.

Once again, auto-multiple-choice was way ahead of us.

We will still consider our current use, since having a handwritten+scanned exam gives some extra trust, and we can eval their exposition, etc. But I'd bet it is possible to do both things: some questions are numeric or multiple-choice, automatically filled by the student; other questions we fill after looking at their handwritten page or a short video for one question.

Long live AMC!

RE: AMC in the age of covid - Added by Benoit Nennig over 4 years ago

Hi,

Another approach is to convert your AMC questions to moodle with amc2moodle (https://github.com/nennigb/amc2moodle). It supports many latex functionalities and we are working on parameterized questions. Please see https://project.auto-multiple-choice.net/boards/2/topics/4224?r=9928#message-9928 for a comparison with the pdfform solution.

Benoit

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