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Assessments

NOTE: *Any time you edit or add an infoAssessment.json file, you need to click the “Load from disk” button in the header so that the PrairieLearn server reloads the changes.

Overview

Each assessment is a single directory in the assessments folder. The directory must contain a single file called infoAssessment.json that describes the assessment and looks like:

{
    "uuid": "cef0cbf3-6458-4f13-a418-ee4d7e7505dd",
    "type": "Exam",
    "title": "Coordinates and Vectors",
    "set": "Quiz",
    "number": "2",
    "allowAccess": [],
    "zones": []
}

Assessment naming

Assessments are organized into sets (e.g., Homework, Quiz, Exam) and within each set the assessment has a number. Additionally, each assessment has a title. Depending on the context, assessments are referred to by either a short name or a long name. The format of these is:

  • Short name = Set Number (e.g., Quiz 2 in the above example).

  • Long name = Set Number: Title (e.g., Quiz 2: Coordinates and Vectors above).

The allowable set names are specified in the (courseInfo.json)[course.md] file.

Assessment types

Each assessment has a type, as listed below. A randomized assessment is one where each student gets a different set of questions in a randomized order, while a non-randomized assessment shows all students the same list of questions in the same order. Broadly speaking, randomized assessments are designed for exams and non-randomized assessments are designed for homeworks.

Type Randomized Description
Homework No A gamified assessment that rewards repeated correct answers to questions.
Exam Yes An exam where students can grade their answers at any time, and retry questions for reduced points.

Question specification

An assessment is broken down in to a list of zones, like this:

"zones": [
    {
        "title": "Easy questions",
        "questions": [
            {"id": "anEasyQ", "points": [10, 5, 3, 1, 0.5, 0.25]},
            {"id": "aSlightlyHarderQ", "points": [10, 9, 7, 5]}
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Hard questions",
        "questions": [
            {"id": "hardQV1", "points": 10},
            {"id": "reallyHardQ", "points": [10, 10, 10]},
            {
                "numberChoose": 1,
                "points": 5,
                "alternatives": [
                    {"id": "FirstAltQ", "points": 10},
                    {"id": "SecondAltQ"}
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
],

  • Each zone appears in the given order in the assessment. Zone titles are optional and are displayed to the student if present.

  • Within each zone the question order is randomized for Exam assessments.

  • An assessment question can be specified by either a single id or by a list of alternatives, in which case one or more of these alternatives is chosen at random. Once the question id is determined, then a random variant of that question is selected. Question alternatives inherit the points of their parent group, if specified.

Assessment and question instances and resetting assessments

PrairieLearn distinguishes between assessments and assessment instances. A assessment is determined by the code in an assessments directory, and is something like "Midterm 1". Given an assessment, PrairieLearn needs to generate the random set of questions and question variants for each student, and it is this selection that is the assessment instance for the student. There is only one copy of each assessment, but every student has their own assessment instance. The rules for updating assessment instances differ between Homework and Exam assessments.

Exam assessment updates: Exam assessment instances are generated when the student starts the exam, and they are never automatically deleted, regenerated, or updated, even when the original assessment is changed in some way. This is a safety mechanism to avoid having students' assessments changed during an exam. However, if you want to force the regeneration of assessment instances then you can do so with the “reset” button on instructor view of the assessment. While writing an assessment you might need to do this many times. Once an assessment is live, you should of course be very careful about doing this (basically, don’t do it on a production server once an assessment is underway).

Homework assessment updates: New questions added to Homeworks will be automatically integrated into student homeworks currently in progress. Updates to maxPoints will take effect the next time a student grades a question. A student's “points” and “percentage score” will never decrease.

Multiple-instance versus single-instance assessments

By default all assessments are single instance, meaning that each student has exactly one instance of the assessment that they can complete, and once they have completed that assessment instance then they cannot do the assessment again. This is the expected behavior for homeworks, quizzes, exams, etc.

For practice exams it is often desirable to make a multiple instance assessment by setting the option "multipleInstance": true. This will allow students to create new assessment instances and try the whole assessment repeatedly.

Auto-closing Exam assessments

By default Exam assessments will auto-close after six hours of inactivity by the student. This generally means that you don't need to explicity close exams that students accidentally did not close when they were done. If you want to prevent auto-closing then you can set "autoClose": false as a top-level option in the infoAssessment.json file.

Access control

See the Access control page for details.

By default, an assessment is only accessible to Instructor users. To change this, the allowAccess option can be used in the assessment's infoAssessment.json file.

Adding text and links to assessments

See the clientFiles and serverFiles page for details, and exam1 in the example course for an example.