Quiz UI redesign scenarios - Entering questions into an exam

Back to Quiz_UI_redesign

Organizing questions and adding them into an exam

Unless exams are very simple, teachers often have a natural set of categories to organize questions in, from course curriculum or from the actual material of the course. In tech-speak, this can be regarded as metadata of the actual questions.

Jack

• carefully crafted, can't reuse the questions (but may be able to use for reference)

Jack primarily creates just exams. For him, exams are one-time wholes and each question is a part of the whole, tightly bound to that one exam.

However, Jack can use his questions as templates, or at least sources for inspiration when creating new exams. Thus he keeps a copy all his exams, sorted by date. If he had time, he sometimes wonders, he would also create an thematical index of all the questions, so that whenever he needed a question from a certain theme, he could just look at the index and see which exams contained a question he needs.

Mary

Based on the themes that come from course curriculum, Mary has organized her questions in categories. Under most themes she has subcategories for different difficulty levels and for most a given exam, she usually has about 60% of easier and 40% of mode difficult questions. Since she has a lot (i.e. dozens ... thousands) of questions for each course, she would find it useful to categorize questions based on different criterias – that is, to be capable of tagging questions, as well as searching for particular questions based on their content, tags or other properties.