Background

Nearly a decade ago in response to faculty demand, a secure online assessment system (SOAS) was developed to meet location constraints for examinations in large courses of over 600 students.  In the past, the use of the system was minimal. However, the move to the new 4-year undergraduate curriculum with more high enrollment general education courses, alongside the rapid changes in technology and programming, has provided an opportunity to update the existing secure online assessment system.

In anticipation of this increasing demand, CELT has been working with ITSC to look for a new solution. While conceivably no single solution can meet all needs, we have identified a commercial product with good potentials. It is the Questionmark Perception assessment management system.  As a pilot trial, the solution has been deployed by Center for Language Education in early September to conduct language tests on 160 students. Some problems have been identified and we believe more work would be required before the solution can be successfully launched. Anyway, we hope the following should provide a basic picture about its functionalities:

Overview

The Questionmark Perception assessment management system allows instructors to

• Author questions and organize them into exams, quizzes, tests
• Deliver assessments via web browsers or secured browsers
• Analyze and distribute meaningful reports

Authoring

For creating and publishing questions and assessments, Questionmark provides browser based authoring features as well as a windows-based authoring application.

Questionmark Authoring Manager is a Windows-based application which provides richer features than the browser based authoring tool. It enables instructors to author questions, organize them into assessments in an intuitive way.

• Item banking
• Wizards for more than 20 different types of questions with a WYSIWYG editor
• Quick assembly of questions into assessments
• Define sophisticated branching and scoring schemes 

Windows-based authoring application – Perception Authoring Manager

Delivery

Questionmark Perception can deliver questions to any web browser, but most browsers are designed to be as open and flexible as possible. When delivering high-stakes tests and exams online, it needs far more security than a web browser can provide.

Questionmark provides a secured browser tool calls Questionmark Secure. It helps prevent cheating on high-stakes exams delivered online by disabling functions that participants could use to print or copy exam material, or gaining access to materials on their computers or the Internet that could give an unfair advantage.

Questionmark Secure can

• Stops people from printing questions.
• Stops people from typing in their own URL.
• Always display in full screen.
• Does not provide menu options or icons.
• Disables control keys and task switching
• Disables right-click menu options.
• Prevents going backwards to a previous page.
• Hides the HTML source. 

Reporting

Questionmark Perception Enterprise Reporter provides 12 report types to distribute meaningful reports on results. This also includes export the result to EXCEL / ASCII for data analysis using other tools and for archiving purposes.

Sample reports available in Enterprise Reporter.