How to give personalized exams with randomized elements using Work to Grade?

Due to Covid-19, it has become mainstream to give on-line exams. A common strategy to make it more difficult for students to cheat by collaborating is to randomize questions, as this increases the amount of coordination required for students to find partners working on the same question.

To facilitate giving exams with randomized elements, Work2Grade now also facilitates on-line distribution of assignment documents and answer forms that will be personalized for individual students.

Log on and check out the online exam of the demonstration course DEMO-01 to see how it works!

The basic idea is that instructors can insert tags in these documents (for now only Word; LaTeX support may be offered later as well) that will be replaced by pseudo-randomly selected variants (text fragments or images).

For example, to give students variants of question 1, you would:

1. in the assignments document, type {{xxx_1#yyy}} for a "customizable" part of the question;
2. (optionally!) in the answer form, type {{zzz#yyy}} for a corresponding part of the answer prompt;
3. in the tag template on the exam properties page of Work2Grade, type
   xxx {{question text variant one||question text variant two||question text variant three}}
   and optionally also
   zzz {{prompt text variant one||prompt text variant two||prompt text variant three}}.

• You can grade work grouped by variant: If you suffix your tags with the question number (e.g., {{xxx_1}}), this will allow you to sort student answers by variant while you are grading their work.
  For each tag, a variant will be selected by pseudo-randomization based on student number and question number, so participants will receive one out of a large number of different combinations.
• You can impose conditions: In the above example, the group suffix #yyy ensures that the variants selected for xxx and zzz will have the same pseudo-random index.
  Tags inserted in the document text will be replaced by one of the text fragments defined as variant in the tag template.
• You can also tag images: Provided that you upload variants for these images, tagged images will be replaced by a variant in the same manner as text fragments.
  Note that images need not be graphics! If your exam questions contain equations or formatted text, you can develop your variants in your favorite word processor, then make screenshots or otherwise save them as images, and then upload them on the exam properties page.
• You can also upload variants for attachments: If your exam question variants relate to different cases for which your students need additional information, you can define one or more exam attachments. For each attachment you then upload the variants as separate documents. Similar to text and image variants, if you specify a group code (e.g., yyy), the selected attachment will match with the other tag(s) having that group code.