How difficult is it to write code for a c-test?

osarusan · 06-06-2014 1:05pm #1

Hi all, I hope this is the right forum for this. The questions being asked here were closer to what I want to ask, than any other tech sub-forum.

So, I work in a university in Japan, and currently we pay quite a lot of money for a pretty unreliable English proficiency placement test.

We are looking at ways to replace this test, and one way is to consider creating our own test. We are thinking about a c-test in particular.

For those who don't know, a c-test works like this. The fi_ _ _ line o_ a para_ _ _ _ _ is wri_ _ _ _ as nor_ _ _, but a_ _ the ot_ _ _ lines ha _ _ letters mis_ _ _ _ in ev_ _ _ second wo_ _. The final line is usally left fully complete too.

So, that's a c-test. There is only one correct answer, and the letters typed by the test taker must match the correct letters exactly.

We could do one on paper, but it would mean correcting 2000 or so by hand, which isn't really feasible. So we'd be interested in creating our own online test. Sothe students login and try and complete the test. They finally click submit, and the number of correct and incorrect answers are recorded, as well as the letters they actually typed (which would help identify their language weaknesses).

Here's an online example of a c-test, in case it's still not clear.

What I'm wondering is, how difficult does it look to write the code for this kind of test, and set up a webpage that would do all I've outlined above? Is it something that a university computer department should be able to put together, or is it something we'd probably need to pay for?

sheesh · 06-06-2014 5:24pm

have a look at moodle it is an open source e-learning tool that makes creating tests quiet easy.

I haven't looked at it in a while but I remember something similar to that in it.

tests can be created in word/openoffice writer with questions and answers being given formats that tell what each piece of text is.

it was quiet simple to do.

moodle.org

the only reason you would need to pay for a system like this is data protection, if you hold peoples data and their grades in a system it has to be built to be protected from hacking.

Tails142 · 06-06-2014 5:27pm

It's easy really, you're just looking for fields to be filled and checked to see if they match the parts of the word that are missing.

The trickiest part will be getting it to look pretty enough not to be a distraction to someone completing the test

bpmurray · 09-06-2014 8:11pm

Probably the easiest way is to manually put the test together in a PDF form, so that the student fills in the form and on completion the answers are sent to a server that has answer-checking built in.

Alternatively, it isn't difficult to program this - the algorithm seems rather simple, so you could provide a set of texts and the program could randomly select the text and remove letters at random, and could check the student's answers too. This logic is simple, but getting the UI nice would be awkward. Perhaps a server-side implementation with the UI in a web page would be easiest?

How difficult is it to write code for a c-test?

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