Toward Developing a Syllabus-Oriented Computer-Based Question-Banks Software to Support Partially Computerized Exams

Aims: This study aims at designing and implementing syllabus-oriented question-bank system that is capable of producing paper-based exams with multiple forms along with answer keys. The developed software tool is named Χ(Chi)-Pro Milestone and supports four types of questions, namely: Multiple-choice, True/False, Short-Answer and Free-Response Essay questions. The study is motivated by the fact that student number in schools and universities is continuously growing at high, non-linear, and uncontrolled rates. This growth, however, is not accompanied by an equiva-lent growth of educational resources (mainly: instructors, classrooms, and labs). A direct result of this situation is having relatively large number of students in each class-room. It is observed that providing and using online-examining systems could be intractable and expensive. As an alterna-tive, paper-based exams can be used. One main issue is that manually produced paper-based ex-ams are of low quality because of some human factors such as instability and relatively narrow range of topics [1]. Further, it is observed that instructors usually need to spend a lot of time and energy in composing paper-based exams with multiple forms. Therefore, the use of computers for automatic production of paper-based exams from question banks is becoming more and mor