Designing and implementing an adaptive online examination system

Abstract

A design and application of adaptive online exam system are carried out in this paper. Adaptive exam systems determine different question sets automatically and interactively for each student and measure their competence on a certain area of discipline instead of comparing their gains with each other. Through an adaptive exam technique, a student's distraction and motivation loss that is led by the questions with quite lower hardness level than his/her competency is prevented. In addition, negative effects of questions requiring higher knowledge than his/her competency over a student's self confidence and morale are dismissed. Since questions are specialized so that they can allow making clear deductions about student gains, they are able to detect student competencies more effectively. Requiring less total time for measuring and being more flexible in the exam management are among the advantages provided by the system. Self sufficiency of the system in terms of planning, repeating and assessment of the measurement process especially allows itself to be used in the individual education sets. Through this system, student competencies can be determined more effectively in cases such as distant-learning, in which some challenges are experienced frequently. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.