The Design and Development of a Semi-auto Computer Generated Testing Paper System — a Case Study in the School of Continuing Education at China University of Geosciences

With the rapidly increasing entrance examinations for the School of Continuing education of CUGB, there is an urgent need of the examination papers that have the parallel testing ability for the same academic program. Based on the analysis of parallel factors and the comparison of the manual generated mode and the computer generated mode, the most time-consuming and experience-consuming steps are found. By providing supports to those steps automatically, a semi-auto computer generated testing paper system was designed and developed for reducing the workload of the experienced faculties to generate testing papers. The papers were generated based on a gradually constructed item-bank. The system offered multiple templates of the testing paper structure plan for assisting semi-auto paper generated procedure and guaranteeing the parallel of the generated papers. In order to construct an item-bank in a short time, an easy-to-use authoring tool with powerful functions was designed and developed. The system supported the spring entrance examination of SCECUGB in 2010 successfully. Faculties gave positive feedback toward the system.