And Now for Something Completely Different...

TestRandomizer

This program randomizes the question and answer ordering in multiple choice exams, thereby allowing the instructor to spend more time generating and analyzing event data.

NOTE: I'm not a big fan of multiple-choice tests and I only use them at the introductory level -- that is, large lecture classes. Upper division classes get objective tests and lots of papers. However, all of the evidence indicates that multiple-choice tests work fine as a diagnostic instrument, the students do written work in their discussion sections, and by using machine-graded multiple choice exams, I save the graduate students a huge amount of work.

WHY?

There are plenty of more sophisticated systems available as either shareware or commercial software that do the same thing that this program will do (and a whole lot more). I couldn't find one for the Macintosh that allowed me to read and write the questions in ASCII, so I wrote this one.

I've been using this for about five years now and most of the bugs appear to be out of it. GTAs pick up the format for writing questions quickly -- and there is now error-checking for the most common mistakes -- and I'm accumulating quite a huge set of questions.

The folder contains the source code, a compiled version of the program, a sample input file, and documentation on how to use the program. Code is ANSI C and should compile most anywhere.

Download TestRandomizer 0.8B2 source code and data files for OS-X
Download TestRandomizer 0.6B1 source code and data files for Linux (Intel) [this version is fairly dated]