Testmacs is intended as an e-learnig support tool, in particular for finance students.
The application can implement classroom tests and is incorporating R extensions.
The student is given a paper-sheet with a test ID and the questions' text.
On screen, Testmacs asks for test ID plus some personal student details.
Questions are without question-text, e.g.:
Question N:
[] a
[] b
[] c
...
[] I do not know.
The test shows a mode line with answered questions and a countdown in minutes. At countdown expiration Testmacs exits, saving answers. At predefined times (10 seconds) the answers are saved locally and remotely.
The paper test may look like follows (click for equivalent PDF):
After the test, a result PDF can be automatically produced (click for equivalent PDF):
Answers are stored locally in the parent of exam-loc-server-ini and remotely in exam-net-course-pt.
To find the remote share, the file retrived from exam-loc-server-ini is used.
Answers collected on the remote folder as text files can be easily parsed with any program to assign grades.
Before the question area, the computer screen reports some fields to collect student details. By default they are:
Test num.: _______
Given Name(s): _______________________ Family Name: _____________________________
Student ID: ___________________
An equivalent answer file is produced locally and remotely (as set by the variables exam-loc-ans-file-pt and exam-net-ans-file-pt. The asnwer file will be similar to the follwing:
exam-id:123
given-name:John
family-name:Doe
student-id:1234567
ans-string:"b" "b" nil nil "b" nil "a" "b" nil "a" nil nil nil nil nil
The values after the colon for exam-id, given-name, family-name, and student-id depend on the respective values typed by the student for Test num., Given Name(s), Family Name and Student ID.
ans-string is clearly a list of the answer given nil being the answers not given.
You can customise the fields adding the file ~/custfld.txt. Note that the Windows launcher redirects the home directory ~ to the subdirectory data found in Testmacs package. Each line in this file has a custom-field entry with the format Name:Width:Text.
Name is the field name as reported in the answer files.
Witdh is the width of the user typing area, but note that the initial width will dynamically expads as the user types.
Text is the text describing the information to be entered, displayed on the screen to the left of the typing area. However, if Width is 0, the field is only informative and there is no information to type. Width can be -1, in which case the nothing is displayed on screen, just the the combination Name:Text is reported in the answer files for further processing.
Example:
project-date:10:Date when you delivered the class project: %v \n
disp-seat-name:0:Computer name is %c\n
seat-name:-1:%c
project-date is an editable field and the text Date when you ... will be displayed replacing %v with an edititable area of 10-character width. Information entered is reported in the answer files as project-date:DATE, where DATE is the value typed by the student.
disp-seat-name displays on the subsequent line the screen text "Computer name is foo", where "foo" is the name of the computer where Testmacs is running.
seat-name is similar to the preceding field, but it does not involve any screen display, only seat-name:foo is reported in the answer files.
To add line-breaks to Text use \n with a single slash.
Customs fields are displayed immediately after default fields area. If you include a default field in ~/custfld.txt, that field will be removed from default field area.
Read the Elisp docstring of exam-loc-cust-fld for more information.
Testmacs performs some actions if detects predefined command filenames in the
remote directory exam-net-data-pt. See action for each command filename.
Command filename "exit007": Emacs will exit in 10 seconds.
Command filename "update007": Emacs updates site-start.el with the file new-site-start.txt
in the remote directory exam-net-data-pt and possibly the file custfld.txt with remote new-custfld.txt.
If new-site-start.txt is not found or there is a copy error a non-critical error is displayed
until the action succeeds or the command filename is removed. Read the docstring of remote-update function for more information.
To be done