> Dear Martin and David,
>
> Thank you for clarifying the issue for me. Yes you can
> generate all these marvellous number of questions from a
> set of possible answers. The problem will be that all the
> generated questions will have different difficulties. This
> does not matter if you are just providing students with
> practice but if you want to use the results for formal
> assessment then getting questions of random difficulty is a
> problem.
Jon Sims Williams
there is an easy solution to the problem varying difficulty ,
the 'master' table that controls the interactions between the different
'statements' also contains a field that describes the difficulty of this
'relationship',
the 'difficulty' of the question is not predetermined by anyone but is
actually created on the fly from a continous calculation based on
1. the rate of attempts at this question
2. the rate of correct answers to this question
3. the rating of each individual attempting this question (how good or bad
the student is)
each attempt at a question is logged, including the time, location and
profile of the individual student,
in addition there is a table totally dedicated to recording the history of
each student, this table can be accessed by both the student and the tutor
allowing for personalised tuition that need not be synchronised in time and
place,
in this way the database provides a 'real' factual calculation of the
difficulty of each question which is not tainted by tutor bias,
regards
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