Forum: support

RE: What would it take to allow for more than 45 questions? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2024-01-19 00:18

Matt, thanks for the follow-up.

For my personally, funding is not the problem. Time is the limiting factor. And I cannot easily substitute funding for time (e.g., I cannot buy myself out of teaching). And the situation is similar for my co-authors of the package.

In principle, we are open to code contributions from others. In fact, this is how some of my co-authors came into the project. Other potential contributions did not go in the "exams" package itself but ended up in new separate packages for example.

So if you think about having a stab at certain improvements, feel free to reach out to me/us. However, as explained in my previous answer, the support for more answer sheets requires changes in various functions. So it's not an easy project for new contributors.

Best wishes,
Achim

RE: What would it take to allow for more than 45 questions? [ Reply ]
By: Matthew Haffner on 2024-01-18 17:38

[forum:49833]

Achim,

Thanks for your response. No worries on not having the time. That is completely understandable, especially for a free software package.

But on that note -- would you have the time if funding were available? Especially given that it has long been on the wishlist? Do you think there would be enough interest to crowd fund such an endeavor? I know the R Consortium has some grant funding available too. I wonder if that would be a possible source of funding. All of this would depend on the interest of you (and maybe others) of course, so if it's not worth your time and energy at the moment, no worries!

I am also preparing for a Fall 2025 sabbatical where I could potentially carve out time to work on this too if you were willing to head it up. Find me a post at your university and I'll for sure make it happen :)

RE: What would it take to allow for more than 45 questions? [ Reply ]
By: Achim Zeileis on 2024-01-10 22:13

[forum:49826]

Matt, thanks for your interest. An extension to more than 45 questions has long been on the wishlist for exams2nops but I simply didn't find the time, yet (and never needed this feature myself).

What other users have been doing in the meantime is simply setting up two separate exams and handing out two separate sheets to each participant.

What needs to be changed in the software to do this in one go:

- Extend the code that generates the LaTeX template to optionally generate subsequent extra pages.

- Extend the scanner code to read such extra pages.

- Extend the three-digit codes in such a way that extra pages can be recognized, ideally automatically.

- Extend the evaluation code to collect all results from all pages, including sanity checking, meaningful warning messages, etc.

- And while we are at that, the whole redesign above should also be done for optional open-ended questions so that multiple pages of open-ended questions can be scanned and evaluated.

None of this is rocket science and there are many building blocks around that could be re-used. However, devil will be in the detail until all elements cooperate smoothly and potential errors are caught reliably. I hope to get round to this at some point but there are no concrete plans, yet, sorry.

What would it take to allow for more than 45 questions? [ Reply ]
By: Matthew Haffner on 2024-01-10 15:43

[forum:49825]

Hi all!

I love the R/exams package, and I committed to using it in two courses this past Fall with great success. These courses are conceptual in nature; thus, exam questions are relatively short and don't require any computations.

I'm wondering what it would take to allow for exams to go beyond 45 questions (say to 50 or 60). I understand this may add quite a bit of package complexity since the answer sheet will take up more than one page. Let me know what you all think! Thanks for your amazing work on this R package.

Matt