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MacQTEX—
Online, Randomised,
Self-Marking Quizzes

Frances Griffin
fgriffin@maths.mq.edu.au

Ross Moore
ross@maths.mq.edu.au

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Copyright c 2003 MacQTEX
Last Revision Date: July 4, 2003
Features
• Online interactive quizzes in mathematics.
• Self marking, providing feedback to the student.
• Numerical parameters are randomised, allowing students to repeat
the same quiz many times with different numbers.
• Fully worked solutions become visible once the quiz is completed.
• Quizzes are personalised for each student, including name and Stu-
dent Id, personalised message appears on completion.
• Delivered as PDF [2, 4, 5] documents containing JavaScript [1, 8]
controlled form fields.
• Platform independent, students only need Acrobat 5 running inside
a web browser.
• Typeset with pdfLATEX [6, 7] using exerquiz [9] (D.P. Story, Uni
of Akron) for high quality typsetting and forms capability.
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• Quiz serving and creation system runs in Mac OS X (or other
JJ II UNIX platform) using free software.
Page 2 of 16 • Three levels of server interaction: a) personalised and records all
results, b) personalised but does not record results, c) stand-alone,
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with all messages and functions fully self-contained.
Motivation for the project
• School leavers often lack basic skills in mathematics, leading to con-
siderable difficulties in units requiring a reasonable level of math-
ematical proficiency.
• Ensure that students do essential revision at beginning of semester,
as concepts and techniques are quickly forgotten after exams.
• Encourage students to practise until they understand the material
and can perform the techniques.
• Quizzes are used in first and second year units as compulsory as-
sessment tasks, but do not attract marks.
• Indicate to students with insufficient mathematical background
that they might withdraw from the unit before it is too late.

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Online delivery

Student’s Student’s
browser browser
+
Acrobat
Warning Wait message Apology
Quiz login message (HTML) message
page (HTML) (HTML)
(HTML)
Update quiz
counters
Quiz Attempt Record quiz
request logged sent
Make more
quizzes
Valid No
user?
Send unique
No quiz
Yes Error?
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Quiz Record Yes
Yes
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No
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Record Enough Update quiz Delete used
Back request quizzes? counters quiz

Sending a quiz to the student’s browser


Recording student’s quiz scores

Student’s
browser
+
Acrobat

Student Personalized
completes quiz result message
(PDF and (FDF)
JavaScript)

Personalized
Result warning
submitted Request
message
(URL-encoded) log
(FDF)

Check if this Yes


version is Record result
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already in student’s
in main log
submitted individual log
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No
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Staff interface
• View student and class logs as tables, graphs or in raw form.
• Make or edit a quiz choosing from existing questions, without writ-
ing any LATEX code or JavaScript.
• Reconstruct an old quiz which has been deleted.
• Set or change quiz expiry dates and pass marks.
• Add students to class list.
• Reinstate access for students who have missed the due date.
• Customise messages which display on completion of the quiz, in
case of unauthorized login, and in response to a student being
denied access after due date.
• Get lists of students who are still to complete quiz requirements.
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• Generate a skeleton login page containing URLs to the required
quizzes and appropriate JavaScript for reducing user error.
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• Housekeeping (priviledged users only).
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How a quiz is made
The exerquiz package
• Provides general mechanism for including form fields and JavaScript
in PDF documents, with special functionality for quizzes.
• Quizzes are interactive, eg. answers can be changed at any time,
immediate feedback is given for various user errors.
• Self marking, so that quizzes need not communicate with a server.
• Solutions are visible after quiz is completed.
• Multiple choice questions.
• Fill-in-the-answer questions, as text or mathematical expressions.
• Text fill-ins use regexps to compare user answer to alternative
forms of the correct answer.
• Parses mathematical expressions and randomly selects values for
the variable (default x), evaluating user answer and correct answer
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at these points. The user answer is considered correct to a given
JJ II precision. Equivalent expressions are recognised.
Page 7 of 16 • Fill-in questions use syntax similar to most programming languages.
• Alerts user when invalid expression is entered, such as unbalanced
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parentheses, unknown variable, syntax error etc.
MacQTEX extensions to exerquiz
• Server interaction (although this is now present is the standard
version of exerquiz).
• Different mechanism for linking to and displaying the solutions.
• Different mechanism for displaying correct answers to fill-in ques-
tions.
• Hints for multiple choice questions, which indicate why a particular
answer choice is wrong. Visible on completion of the quiz.
• New look and feel using customised version of pdfscreen [11].
• Many extensions to the JavaScript controlling the fill-in questions,
including options to
– disallow decimal answers;
– evaluate factorials and binomial coefficients, or disallow these,
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making students find the numerical answer;
– extend the random value selection to only choose integers
JJ II when evaluating expressions such as (−3)n ;
Page 8 of 16 – answers which are lists, such as elements of a set, can be
entered in any order;
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– parse and test strings in a regular language.;
• Other extensions to JavaScript in order to
– disallow multiple attempts at the same version of the quiz,
this is also checked by the server when quiz results are recorded;
– display progress messages on completion of the quiz, either
supplied by server via FDF [3], or internal to the quiz;
– implement timings and display the time taken when student
gets perfect score.

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How randomisation is achieved

Quiz creation HTML form


script (perl)

Question choices
Quiz title, topic
Colour scheme
File name

perl header Quiz


perl sources for questions needs
LATEX sources for questions editing

Create quiz directories Run perl Run Final Display sample


Assemble perl source source LATEX job LATEX job quiz (PDF)
Link to LATEX sources for quiz
Create LATEX master files Quiz
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OK
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LATEX Incomplete quiz Complete Generate first
Page 10 of 16 definitions PDF containing solutions quiz (PDF) batch of quizzes
files PDF containing hints
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Programming practicality vs. educational considerations
• Multiple choice or fill-in-the-answer?
– Wrong answers for multiple choice questions are based on
common errors, but sometimes these are not predictable.
– Use multiple choice rather than fill-in for elementary skills.
– Correct answer may be too obvious in multiple choice.
– Fill-in expressions should be as short as possible.
– Fill-in questions require less programming effort than multiple
choice.
• How much variation in a single question?
– Questions covering a large number of cases may be elegant,
but it can be more time efficient to make several simpler ques-
tions instead.
– Lecturers often prefer to have control over which cases are
presented, so these are done as separate questions.
J I • How much detail should be in the solutions?
– Space limits the amount of detail, but students like to see
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every step!
Page 11 of 16 – If a solution is too long, lead up questions are included, which
establish the techniques needed to answer the more compli-
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cated question.
Designing randomisation of questions
• Need enough variation to make question interesting, but not so
much that it requires huge effort to program.
• Most programming effort goes into generating the intermediate
results for the solutions.
• Must avoid parameters which give trivial answers or overly tedious
calculations, or duplicate answers in multiple choice questions.
• TEX and JavaScript expressions are passed through filters to re-
move silliness such as + − 3x, 1x, x0 etc.
• Simple mathematics sometimes creates tricky programming or type-
setting problems.
• Develop algorithms for gcd calculations, n Pr , nr , reducing frac-


tions and surds to simplest terms, set operations, truth tables


for randomly generated logical expressions, randomly construct-
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ing regular languages,. . .
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Why Perl [10] rather than Mathematica or Maple?
• Perl ’s string handling provides ease in producing strings in TEX
format.
• Perl ’s overheads are much less than those of specialised algebra
packages.
• Algebra packages still require special programming to generate in-
termediate results for solutions.
• Perl ’s special functions such as regexps and eval make it preferable
to lower level languages such as C.
• Construction of TEX and JavaScript strings can be built into an
algorithm.
• Output of intermediate results becomes part of an algorithm rather
than a separate task.
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Acknowledgements
MacQTEX has received support in the form of
• An equipment grant from Apple Computer, Australia Pty Ltd, via
the Apple Universities Consortium;
• Funding via a Targeted Flagship Grant from the Centre for Flexible
Learning, Macquarie University, and the Division of Information
and Communication Sciences, Macquarie University.

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References
[1] Adobe Systems Inc.; “Acrobat Forms JavaScript Object Specifica-
tion, Version 5.0.5”; Technical Note #5186; Revised: September 14,
2001. 2
[2] Adobe Systems Inc.; Acrobat Reader, viewer for PDF format [4]
documents, available free of charge from http://www.adobe.com/.
2
[3] Adobe Systems Inc.; “FDF Toolkit Overview”; Technical Note
#5194; Revised: August 10, 1999. 9
[4] Adobe Systems Inc.; “PDF Reference second edition Adobe
Portable Document Format Version 1.3”; July, 2000. 2, 15
[5] Adobe Systems Inc.; “pdfmark Reference Manual, Version: Acrobat
5.0”; Technical Note #5150; Adobe Developer Relations; Revised:
June 25, 2001. 2
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[6] Hàn, Thê´ Thành; pdf-TEX, free software for generating documents
JJ II in PDF format, based on the TEX typesetting system. Available for
Page 15 of 16 all computing platforms; see http://www.tug.org/applications/
pdftex/. 2
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[7] Lamport, Leslie; LATEX, a Document Preparation System. This is
free software available for all computing platforms. Consult the TEX
User’s Group (TUG) website, at http://www.tug.org/. 2
[8] Netscape Communications Corporation; Core JavaScript Reference,
2001; available online at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/
manuals/javascript.html. 2
[9] Story, Donald; exerquiz & AcroTEX, packages for including special
effects in PDF documents, using TEX and LATEX. Dept. of Mathe-
matics and Computer Science, University of Akron. Software avail-
able online from http://www.math.uakron.edu/~dpstory/webeq.
html. 2
[10] Wall, Larry; Perl, a general purpose scripting language for all
computing platforms. This is Free Software, available from http:
//www.perl.com/. 13
J I [11] Radhakrishnan, C.V.; pdfscreen Manual, available from http://
www.river-valley.com. 8
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[12] Verbruggen, Martien; GDGraph Documentation, available from
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http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN/data/GDGraph/Graph.
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