1.3 Operational Setting

Pre Installation Environment:

Currently, there are two major environments involved in testing at the University level. The first is the administration environment, which primarily involves instructors and school administrators. Their responsibilities include creating, administering, grading, analyzing, and recording tests and test scores. Presently, instructors and instructor aids do most of this work manually. Although instructors may use some electronic tools to facilitate generating or grading tests on line or over a local area network, there are few tools that exist to fully automate the process of doing both.

The second major environment is the testing environment. This includes the students and the classrooms where they take the exams. The Test Tool is designed to be part of academic domain software, so its ideal setting would be in a classroom equipped with modern networked computers, or in an instructor's office environment. Although test styles vary from instructor to instructor, test taking typically involves hand written responses on paper or scantrons. Students must manually keep track of the time and can only roughly estimate the amount of time that should be allocated to each question.

Post Installation Environment:

Our goal is to create a single testing tool that will automate the process of generating, grading, and analyzing tests. In doing so, we hope to improve the experience of testing for both the instructors and students. Such computerized automation will involve a number of changes to both the administrative and testing environments.

The testing environment will change the most. In order to automate grading, students must take tests on a computer. For this to be feasible, we must install computers for each student in the classrooms where the exams are to be taken. In addition to the computers, a network must be installed to connect each computer to a server that provides the test. Student users would complete a test on an individual computer and submit it to the server to be graded. For instructors who choose to use this testing tool, computerized tests can be used as a fully functional replacement for manual testing in the testing environment.

The administrative environment will not change quite as drastically. Some new computerized tools will be introduced; however, these tools will be designed to increase efficiency of creating and grading tests. Test creation will be a new experience for most users. Exams will be created semi-automatically, and will not need to be printed in hard copy form since the test is to be taken electronically. The test grading processor will not change as much. Most instructors already use computerized systems to keep track of grades. The testing tool will provide its own set of computerized tools for grading, and will interface with any currently used tools to analyze test results. Instructors will need to learn new computer programs; however, these programs will have similar interfaces to the tools many instructors already use.