On the Problem of Generating a Large Number of Comparable Test Variants

Abstract

The paper presents a possible way of solving the problem of creating more test variants for a large number of students divided into groups. The proposed solution may consist in introducing a parameterized automatic test generator. The principle of an automatic parameterized test generator is shown. The process of the question tree construction according to the increasing numbers of questions in the banks of the particular subjects leads to a combinatorial explosion. This often results in the excessive time of generation of the different variants of tests. To solve this problem, a heuristic method based on a pre-processing stage that precedes the construction of the searching tree is proposed. Further, the results of the experiments comparing the time of the test generation and the congruence of the test variants generated by the algorithm either using or non-using this heuristics are presented. According to these results, the use of the generator with the proposed heuristics provides a considerably shorter time of generation, and the congruence of the generated test variants is even better in most cases.

Keywords

• automatic test generation
• combinatorial explosion
• evaluation methodologies
• XSL transformation