netbeans plugin to prepare and correct performance assessments in an electronic exam setting
In modern education, your exam setting is as natural and realistic to the student as posible. If they learn to program/write SQL querys/etc during the course using a|their computer, then the exam should provide that same environment.
The aspect of fraude, potentially possible when using the personally owned and managed laptop in an exam setting is a separate issue, that is not addressed here. We have solved that by providing the students with a live system on a usb thumb-drive, which we prepare and configure.
The setting which correctors workbench addresses is one of a electronic exam, in which the candidates task is to write program source code in some code writers tool (IDE). The assumption is that the examiner prepares the exam from some set of programming tasks (e.g. add code to method bodies, write sql queries etc), in which the actual work for the candidate is to fill the 'blank parts'. The exam consists of one ore more source files (with the blank parts) and a description of the task. The description can be given on paper or be intermixed with the source code.
An example in Java would be: the task is described in the (Java-doc) method header. These in those parts of the solution that have been removed beforehand by the examiner.
The students hand in their solution by somehow uploading their work to a server. In our case (Fontys Venlo software engineering business informatics) we use a version control system as the mechanism to hand in work. A the moment of writing this is subversion.
A correctors workbench has the following requirements:
- Help prepare the exam: prepare exam from solution or existing program or script.
- Collect the exam from the server
- enable the corrector to work through the set of exams in task, student order
- view student answer to task and example solution on the same screen (in two separate ereas)
- be able to add a grade per task in any grading system.
- view progress per task-set and for the whole exame
- split the workload between examiners, each correcting different tasks.
- add remarks to the tasks (motivation for a given grade)
- collect the individual end grades per students in some tabular format
It is assumed that the collecting of the grades per task is the final step. Any weighting, overall grade correcting or otherwise processing the grades into a format that is acceptable to the local administration is left to the user. We us a database (to provide multiple examiners to work in parallel) and export the grades from a view to a spreadsheet, which is ready for handing in.
A web version, which is used now, gives some ideas on the elements in the windows, is shown below.
