What Tester does

     Tester was designed to help teachers easily create and edit exams and to help students (of all ages) practice for exams.

     Teachers can use Tester to manage almost any kind of test.  The various types of test questions that can be created are described in detail in a later section.  Once the test is created, multiple copies (with answer keys) can be printed.  This is where Tester is very helpful for teachers:  each copy of the printed test will have the questions in a different order.  Even the multiple-choice answers will be scrambled within each question.  This makes it much harder for the students to copy off each other’s exams.

     Teachers can also use Tester to manage large question pools.  By grouping similar questions together into categories and telling Tester how many questions to print from each category, an even larger variability in the printed tests can be achieved.  (Of course, it is the teacher’s responsibility to insure that all the questions in a category are equally difficult so that some versions of a test do not turn out to be much harder than others.)

     Teachers can even use Tester in the classroom by letting the students use it to practice taking tests.  When a test is opened for practice, a pre-specified number of questions are selected and displayed.  The students can browse through them and select the answers they believe to be correct.  They can then ask Tester to check their answers and tell them how well they did.  Once Tester has displayed their score, they can choose to retry the questions that they answered incorrectly, or they can browse through the questions to compare their answers with the correct ones.  Since each question can include a detailed solution (which will be displayed only after checking the student’s answers), the students can potentially learn a great deal.

     Tester can also record the results of each student’s computer practice session in a log file.  The teacher can then use Tester to open this log file and analyze it by displaying a histogram of the students’ scores and by searching for questions that may be too easy or too hard.  (The questions that are rated too hard are especially interesting since they indicate material that may need to be covered more thoroughly during lecture.)

     To prevent the students from modifying the test or “cheating” by opening the test to look directly at the correct answers, you can lock the test so that it can only be opened for practice.

     But Tester isn’t just for students in school.  Students of all ages can use Tester to create and practice for tests at home.  As an example of this, a sample California Driver’s License test is distributed along with Tester.

     If you want to distribute a test that you have created, you can add a title page to it that displays your name and address and requests a shareware fee.  You can also lock the test so nobody can tamper with it.  In this case, it is best to lock it to Browse mode so that people will be able to see and study all the questions, rather than only the ones that are randomly chosen when the test is opened for practice.