TITLE:
Toward Developing a Syllabus-Oriented Computer-Based Question-Banks Software to Support Partially Computerized Exams
AUTHORS:
Sulieman Bani-Ahmad
KEYWORDS:
Exam Preparation Tools, Syllabus-Oriented Question Banks, Partially Computerized Exams, Iterative and Incremental Software Development Model, X-Pro Milestone
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.8 No.5,
May
22,
2015
ABSTRACT: Aims: This study aims at designing and
implementing syllabus-oriented question-bank system that is capable of
producing paper-based exams with multiple forms along with answer keys. The
developed software tool is named Χ(Chi)-Pro Milestone and supports four types
of questions, namely: Multiple-choice, True/False, Short-Answer and
Free-Response Essay questions. The study is motivated by the fact that student
number in schools and universities is continuously growing at high, non-linear,
and uncontrolled rates. This growth, however, is not accompanied by an
equivalent growth of educational resources (mainly: instructors, classrooms,
and labs). A direct result of this situation is having relatively large number
of students in each classroom. It is observed that providing and using
online-examining systems could be intractable and expensive. As an
alternative, paper-based exams can be used. One main issue is that manually
produced paper-based exams are of low quality because of some human factors
such as instability and relatively narrow range of topics [1]. Further, it is
observed that instructors usually need to spend a lot of time and energy in
composing paper-based exams with multiple forms. Therefore, the use of
computers for automatic production of paper-based exams from question banks is
becoming more and more important. Methodology: The design and evaluation of
X-Pro Milestone are done by considering a basic set of design principles that
are based on a list of identified Functional and Non-Functional Requirements.
Deriving those requirements is made possible by developing X-Pro Milestone
using the Iterative and Incremental model from software engineering domain. Results:
We demonstrate that X-Pro Milestone has a number of excellent characteristics
compared to the exam-preparation and question banks tools available in market.
Some of these characteristics are: ease of use and operation, user-friendly
interface and good usability, high security and protection of the question
bank-items, high stability, and reliability. Further, X-Pro Milestone makes
initiating, maintaining and archiving Question-Banks and produced exams
possible. Putting X-Pro Milestone into real use has showed that X-Pro Milestone
is easy to be learned and effectively used. We demonstrate that X-Pro Milestone
is a cost-effective alternative to online examining systems with more and
richer features and with low infrastructure requirements.