Added first release version of new interface exams2inspera() for the
assessment platform Inspera. It is using
exams2qti21() internally with a custom XML template and a few further
tweaks. Not all features work correctly, though, notably the inclusion
of graphics and other supplementary files.
Support of string scans in nops_fix().
Improvements in nops_scan() to read the registration id somewhat more
reliably in the presence of scanning artefacts (e.g., single white lines
through a check box). Also scanner marks are found more reliably when
the bottom margin is smaller than in the PDF from exams2nops().
Improvement in nops_eval(..., interactive = TRUE): If changes are made
in the scans or string_scans files, then the original files are
overwritten in the original directory rather than the working directory
(reported by Chat Wacharamanotham).
In exsolution the | can now not only be used as the separator symbol
for multiple solutions in a cloze exercise but additionally within the
solutions. This is useful for example when the answer string is a regular
expression. In this case the | has to be within round brackets, e.g.,
exsolution: (OLS|ML)|01001. This gets interpreted as two elements with
values (OLS|ML) and 01001.
Added a warning in exams2arsnova() and make_exams_write_arsnova() that
these functions will be removed in future versions of the package. The
reason is that ARSnova has been superseded by Particify and hence it is
recommended to transition to exams2particify().
Changed default HTML/mathematics converter in exams2canvas() to
converter = "pandoc-mathjax" (rather than enforcing MathML output as
before). Recent versions of Canvas have improved MathJax support (see
Canvas Release Notes 2021-02-20)
and employing MathJax in the Canvas quiz might facilitate importing the quiz
into a Canvas question bank (reported and tested by Jeff Pisklak).
Additional NOPS language support: Catalan (ca, contributed by Paco Rivière).
In exams2pdf() an empty getOption("pdfviewer") is now caught with an
informative error (raised in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79100895/).
Function match_exams_iteration(), introduced in the previous versions, was
erroneously not exported from the NAMESPACE, added now.
Fixed long-standing bug in boxplots exercise. In rare cases (about once in 2,000 random versions) the exercises claimed that there were outliers in the plot when in fact there were none (reported by Gabriele Cantaluppi).
All Rmd exercise templates with embedded graphics have been slightly simplified.
The lines with just \ before the figure code chunks have been replaced with
empty lines. Initially, the \ lines had been necessary to suppress figure
captions but this has not been necessary anymore for a long time.
Improve handling of duplicated textattachmentfile names in exams2pdf()
(reported by Francisco Goerlich).
New function nops_fix() that can be applied to the ZIP file resulting from
nops_scan(). By default it goes through all rows of the scanned data and
interactively prompts for updates to fields from the scanned exam sheets that
need updating. Optionally, the user can specify the rows of the scanned data
and/or the fields that should be updated.
By default, nops_scan() now relies on the R packages qpdf and magick
for merging/rotating/splitting PDF files and converting them to PNG,
respectively. Thus, the system requirements of PDFTk (pdftk) and ImageMagick
(convert), respectively, are not necessary anymore for scanning NOPS
exams. However, for a transition period the old system calls for PDFTk/ImageMagick
are still used when the R packages qpdf and/or magick are not available.
The default evaluation rule in exams2moodle() and all QTI-based exams2xyz()
interfaces (e.g., exams2blackboard(), exams2canvas(), exams2openolat(), etc.)
is now consistently partial = TRUE and negative = FALSE (as in previous
versions) and rule = "false2". This was already the default rule in
most scenarios in previous versions. But for mchoice elements within cloze
exercises it often was "none" (i.e., no negative points even when
partial credits were used) which has been changed to the more
commonly-used rule = "false2" now. (Reported by Hans-Peter Schröcker.)
In exams2qti21() (and thus also in exams2openolat()) fractional points
are now rounded up (if necessary) at eight decimal places. Otherwise
the cutvalue might not be attained, especially for partial = FALSE.
(Reported by Thomas Fetz.)
Convenience extension for cloze exercises with elements embedded by
##ANSWERi## tags: The "Answerlist" only has to be specified if there
are schoice/mchoice elements, otherwise it can be omitted. For
exercises with mixed elements, the "Answerlist" only has to specify
the entries of the schoice/mchoice elements while the empty entries
for all other num or string/essay/file elements can optionally
be omitted.
New standard meta-information types exauthor and extags. The latter is for
tagging an exercise so that it can eventually be filtered, grouped, etc.
A typical example for an extags is extags: poisson which could signal that
an exercise is related to the Poisson distribution. Note that this might
complement the hierarchical exsection meta-information which can be used for
hierarchical grouping, e.g., exsection: regression/glm/poisson. Finally,
extags can define tag classes/group by adding a = as in extags: grade=2
or extags: stage=advanced etc. Multiple tags can be separated by |.
In schoice and mchoice questions an error (rather than just a warning)
is thrown when the lengths of the question list and the exsolution do
not match. Also, the reading of question lists is more robust now for
Markdown exercises.
New convenience function match_exams_iteration() that can be used within
an exercise to query the current iteration (within n replications), e.g.,
to always cycle through the same finite set of parameters.
Improvement in nops_scan() when finding the bottom markings of the scan.
A smaller minimal bottom margin is assumed (3% instead of 7%) in order to
better deal with different paper formats, specifically letter paper (reported
by Perry de Valpine).
Improvement in nops_eval() so that for schoice questions no partial
credits are used even if they are enabled for mchoice questions in the
eval specification.
Additional NOPS language support: Bulgarian (bg, contributed by Nikolay
Rachev) and Polish (pl, contributed by Paweł Kleka). Corrections in
French (fr, contributed by Jean-Philippe Georget), Russian (ru,
contributed by Nikolay Rachev), and Spanish (es, contributed by Flavio
Lozano Isla).
Various exams2xyz() interfaces gained arguments envir = NULL and/or
engine = NULL. Both are passed on to xweave(). The envir argument
can be used to control in which environment all exercises are processed
in case knitr is used. The engine argument specifies whether
"Sweave" (default) or "knitr" is used for rendering Rnw exercises.
These arguments have been added in: exams2arsnova(), exams2blackboard(),
exams2grasple(), exams2html(), exams2lops(), exams2moodle(),
exams2pandoc(), exams2qti12() (and hence interfaces based on it like
exams2canvas()), exams2qti21() (and hence interfaces based on it like
exams2openolat()), exams2testvision().
In Rmd exercises only the meta-information tags (extype, exsolution, etc.)
from the Meta-information are read. If the same tags occur elsewhere in
the file they are ignored now. (Reported by Joan Sanz.)
Include better table formatting by default in exams2moodle(). Styles
table = "table_shade", "table_rule", and "table_grid" had already
been available since version 2.4-0, but table = "table_shade" is now
the new default. Alternatively, users can also set a custom table class
and then use the css argument for controlling the rendering of that
class.
In exams2moodle(), exams2testvision(), exams2qti12(), and exams2qti21()
(and all interfaces built on top of these like exams2openolat()) the default is now
enumerate = FALSE (rather than TRUE) so that single-choice and
multiple-choice answers are not listed with letters a., b., c., ...
The default was changed because it produces questions with less "clutter"
but may make it a little bit harder to match solution lists in the feedback
to the item lists in the question.
In exams2moodle() the string elements in cloze exercises now also
correctly support the usecase = TRUE option (reported by Joan Sanz).
In exams2moodle() the eval for schoice exercises is now correctly
processed in case of negative points (reported in
78581471 on StackOverflow).
In both matrix_to_schoice() and matrix_to_mchoice() the handling of
vector (rather than matrix) inputs is improved. In this case the question
list shows only a single index for the chosen element(s) rather than row
and column indexes (suggested by Thomas Fetz).
Further improved name handling in exams2qti21() (and thus also in
exams2openolat()): Periods in file names are avoided (like spaces and
leading integers) as OpenOlat otherwise cannot read the file (reported
by Andrea Erhart).
The default in exams2particify() was changed to fix_choice = FALSE because
most Particify systems in use will probably support the math rendering in
answer options now. So the fixup does not need to be enabled by default.
Also, the function now tries to assure Unix-style linebreaks on Windows
systems because the default Windows linebreaks could lead to problems
with reading the correct answers.
New argument exams2nops(..., newpage = FALSE). If set to TRUE a
page break (\newpage in LaTeX) is added after every exercise.
The logo in exams2nops(..., logo = ...) can now also be a relative
path (relative to the working directory). Also logo = "uibk" is supported
as a convenience option for including the logo of Universität Innsbruck.
The exam type in exams2nops() now codes the number of exercises directly
(rather than rounding the number to multiples of 5). This facilitates fixing
the correct number of questions in nops_fix().
The answer lists in exams2nops() are now labeled \alph{enumii}. rather than
(\alph{enumii}). Also the main exam sheet also uses \alph{} with a custom
counter to label the check boxes for the answers.
When converting exercises with a converter based on make_exercise_transform_pandoc()
to Markdown with Base64 output, graphics in <img> tags are now correctly
encoded as well.
In all QTI-based interfaces (and also exams2moodle()) with
exams2xyz(..., mchoice = list(enumerate = FALSE)) the solutionlist
(if any) is formatted as an unordered list (rather than without any
formatting).
It is now also possible to extract the meta-information from the output of
xexams() and all exams2xyz() interfaces as a data.frame (rather than
a list of lists) via exams_metainfo(..., class = "data.frame").
Scientific notation produced by knitr is now correctly converted to numeric
when reading the meta-information. (Reported in questions
61254298 and
75766543 on StackOverflow.)
The (total) number of points in exams2blackboard() is now formatted as
%.3f rather than %d.0 so that it can also be fractional (with up to
three decimal places) rather than integer.
Various improvements in exams2testvision(), especially for cloze exercises
combining various types of questions. In particular, a bug was fixed for
cloze exercises with ##ANSWERi## tags which lead to unbalanced <div> tags
in previous versions.
Added support for \pandocbounded{} (as produced by pandoc starting from
version 3.2.1) in all current LaTeX templates as well as exams2nops().
Currently, \pandocbounded{} does not anything in the exams templates so
that the size of the graphics in PDF output still has to be controlled in one
of the previously available ways (e.g., within the exercises, via the
exams2xyz() interface, or via the Gin key in the LaTeX template).
Switched the entire package to support UTF-8 encodings by default for
all exercises types. Previously, this was only the case for .Rmd exercises
due to the UTF-8 requirement of pandoc (which is now a system requirement
for exams). All templates etc. have been modified to support UTF-8 out-of-the-box.
Support for all other encodings like ISO-8859-* (latin1, latin9, etc.),
which had previously been available for .Rnw exercises in certain interfaces,
has been disabled. While this reduces the functionality of the package slightly,
it greatly facilitates working with UTF-8 which appears to be predominantly
used in practice. Documentation also becomes easier/clearer.
To facilitate working with .Rmd exercises and embedded graphics or data files
base64enc, knitr, and rmarkdown are now imported in the package (and not
just suggested).
Several extensions in exams2qti21() (and thus inherited by exams2openolat())
that provide more control and options in the assessments.
cutvalue (for passing a test/exam/quiz). By default,
this is cutvalue = NULL (or equivalently cutvalue = NA) which means that no
pass/fail status is computed at all, i.e., only the sum of the points is reported.
Moreover, cutvalue may be a float now and is not coerced to an integer anymore (also
applied in exams2qti12()).navigation = "nonlinear". This can be switched to "linear"
enforcing that questions in the test must be answered sequentially while the
default "nonlinear" means that participants can switch back and forth between
questions.selection = "pool" that controls how exercises and sections are
sampled. By default, the function creates one section for each exercise from which
one replication will be selected in the exam. If selection = "exam" each section
contains all questions and one section will be selected for the exam. The "exam"
variant has the advantage that nsamp can be fully used now and that questions
that build on each other can be used in the exam.shufflesections = FALSE can be set to TRUE in order to
randomly shuffle the order of sections/exercises for each participant.
For selection = "pool" this corresponds to shuffling the
sections that contain the pools of exercises. For selection = "exam"
it corresponds to shuffling the exercises within each exam section.cloze_schoice_display = "auto" that controls the display of schoice
elementsin cloze exercises. By default, radio "buttons" are used if the answer
list appears in its own paragraph and a "dropdown" menu is used if the answer list
appears inline (and has no mathematical markup). Both options can also be enforced
explicitly, independently from the answer list appearing in a separate paragraph
or inline.allowskipping = TRUE controlling whether exercises
can be skipped without answering (default) or must be answered.allowreview = FALSE controlling whether exercises
can be viewed again at the end of a test/exam.allowcomment = FALSE can be set to TRUE to allow comments.casesensitive = TRUE that controls whether the evaluation of
string exercises is case sensitive or not.stitle (section title) and ititle (item title) are now
NULL so that items are simply numbered consecutively (1, ..., n) and
section titles are omitted.sdescription is now empty omitting the section
description as it is typically not necessary.solutionswitch = TRUE and maxattempts != 1 a warning is issued now.
This is because with more than one attempt participants could otherwise
copy the solution shown after an incorrect first attempt.maxattempts can now be a vector so that different numbers of
attempts per question are allowed for different sections/questions.An extended list of configuration options for OpenOlat assessments is now provided
through the argument config = TRUE in exams2openolat(). The logical
specification config = TRUE/FALSE uses the default configuration or
switches off the extra configuration entirely, respectively. Moreover,
a list of options like config = list(cancel = TRUE, scoreprogress = TRUE)
can be provided for customizing how OpenOlat renders the QTI 2.1 content.
Several extensions for cloze questions in exams2moodle():
mchoice elements in cloze questions are now properly supported.
By default they are shown as MULTIRESPONSE checkboxes and employ
Moodle's default evaluation strategy where each incorrect box eliminates
one correct box. A different evaluation strategy can, in principle, be
chosen but Moodle might not process all negative points correctly.schoice elements in cloze questions are still rendered as
MULTICHOICE drop-down menus by default unless they contain math markup.
As this is not rendered by Moodle in drop-down menus, a MULTICHOICE_V
column of radio buttons is used in this case.mchoice and schoice elements in
cloze questions, the are now both cloze_mchoice_display and
cloze_schoice_display arguments. This is not fully backward compatible
because in previous versions cloze_mchoice_display was also used to
customize schoice elements. Now a warning is issued in this case.cloze questions which relies on
curly brackets. Hence, these are properly escaped now.string items
(SHORTANSWER) needed to be properly escaped.num and/or
string sub-items (e.g., when presented in a table), arguments
numwidth and stringwidth have been added to make_question_moodle().
Alternatively, they can also be specified through exextra tags in
each exercise. See the fourfold2 exercise for an example and
?make_question_moodle for more details.For illustrating the new improved cloze capabilities in exams2moodle()
and exams2qti21()/exams2openolat(), there is a new exercise "lm2"
which combines all basic exercise types: num, schoice, mchoice,
and string. Another extended version of this exercises, called "lm3",
has also been added which adds essay (text editor) and file upload
interactions (see also below).
Extended processing of string exercises for learning management systems
like Moodle, OpenOlat, or other QTI-based systems. By default, string
exercises are intended for closed-format short-text answers that have to
be matched exactly by the participants. Additionally, open-ended text
answers can now be enabled by setting the exstringtype meta-information
to essay and/or file. The former requests a text editor for
entering an answer while the latter requests a file upload dialogue.
The "essayreg" exercise has been modified to leverage this new
meta-information.
Similarly, the exclozetype meta-information now also accepts essay
or file instead of string for elements of a cloze exercise.
Currently, the combination of these types with num or schoice
elements etc. is only possible for QTI-based systems (i.e., OpenOlat
in particular) but not for Moodle (whose cloze format does not support
open-ended text answers). For illustration, see the new "essayreg2"
and "lm3" exercises.
Added new interface exams2ilias() for the open-source ILIAS learning
management system (https://www.ilias.de/). This is essentially a
convenience wrapper to exams2qti12(), tweaking a few defaults and
employing a somewhat modified XML template. Not all question types
are supported, though, mostly string questions with open-ended
answers and multiple-choice and single-choice questions. Numeric and
cloze questions are not supported, yet.
Added first release version of new interface exams2testvision() for the
Dutch testing platform TestVision. It is
essentially a fork of exams2qti21() that incorporates TestVision's own
strict implementation of QTI 2.1. See the
online tutorial
on how to upload the zip output from exams2testvision() into the system
by selecting it in the import menu and then moving the imported material
to the appropriate directories. The work on the function was financially
supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science
(Project code OL20-06), and the University of Amsterdam.
Added first release version of new interface exams2grasple() for
Grasple, a Dutch practice platform for
mathematics and statistics education. It supports num and schoice
questions which are exported to a zip file containing
Grasple's JSON format.
Note that currently importing cannot be done by users themselves; it
requires a request for manual import by a Grasple team member. The
work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch Ministry
of Education, Culture and Science (Project code OL20-06), and the
University of Amsterdam.
Added new interface exams2particify() that can export exercises to a
comma-separated values (CSV) format for import in the audience response
system Particify (https://particify.de/), the successor to ARSnova.
In particular, single-choice and multiple-choice exercises are fully
supported while num and string question are converted to open-ended text
questions.
Added new interface exams2kahoot() that can export sufficiently simple
single-choice and multiple-choice exercises to an Excel sheet via
openxlsx::write.xlsx() that can be imported by the game-based learning
platform Kahoot! at https://kahoot.com/ (suggested by Rushad Faridi).
Exercises are converted to plain text and questions must not exceed 120
characters, answers must not exceed 75 characters.
New experimental function moodle2exams() that can take a Moodle XML
quiz file with numeric, multichoice, shortanswer, and essay exercises and
convert them to R/exams exercise files, either in R/Markdown (Rmd, default)
or R/LaTeX (Rnw) format. If the text formatting is more advanced (e.g.,
containing mathematical notation or tables etc.) the function might not
lead to fully satisfactory results but still provide a useful starting
point for subsequent manual editing.
New function testvision2exams() to convert TestVision's QTI 2.1 questions
to R/exams exercise files, either in R/Markdown (Rmd, default) or R/LaTeX
(Rnw) format. The supported TestVision question types are 'invul (numeriek)',
'een-uit-meer', 'meer-uit-meer', and 'open' which are converted to num,
schoice, mchoice, and string, respectively.
When running exercises via knitr::knit() errors in the R code will stop
the evaluation now by default. This was always the default behavior for Rnw
exercises (i.e., when processed with engine = "sweave") but now is also
the default for Rmd exercises and for Rnw exercises via engine = "knitr".
In exercises processed via knitr::knit() it is possible to carry on with
code evaluation after errors (the default in knitr) by setting the chunk
option error = TRUE. Similarly, the default handling of warnings has been
set to warning = FALSE so that warnings are reported on the console rather
than in the weaved/knitted exercises.
Added new argument texengine = "pdflatex" to exams2pdf() which is passed
on to tinytex::latexmk(..., engine = texengine). Provided that tinytex
support is installed, this option can also be set to texengine = "xelatex"
or "lualatex" for example.
Added exams2blackboard(..., mathjax = NULL) that optionally embeds the
MathJax <script> in each of the exercises so that mathematical content
can be rendered by MathJax (rather than by the browser directly). The default
is FALSE unless converter = "pandoc-mathjax" is used. But
also for the default converters (producing MathML output) mathjax = TRUE
can be used. (Suggested and tested by Sean Quallen and Gabriele Cantaluppi.)
Improvements in exams2blackboard():
<pre> to <code> tags
if fix_pre = TRUE (default) which is necessary in classical Blackboard
systems.expoints.shuffle = TRUE which used to lead to a missing
closing bracket.The auxiliary functions from exams_eval() now explicitly distinguish
between multiple-choice (mchoice) and single-choice (schoice) exercises
provided that the type of exercise is provided to the functions.
Consequently, schoice questions are now handled like num or string
questions that can just be correct or wrong (and not like mchoice
questions anymore). Partial credits are only supported for mchoice
questions.
Various improvemens in nops_scan(), especially for scanning the boxes
pertaining to the student registration ID. Rather than reading a very
small area around each box and just shaving off its borders, a larger
area is read now and then shaved iteratively. Hence, setting it is also
easily possible to further increase the size of the area which may
sometimes lead to improved scanning results.
Improved handling of reglength < 7 in exams2nops(). Internally,
reglength = 7 is still enforced (and thus necessary in the registration
CSV file) but the initial IDs are fixed to "0" in the exam sheet and
corresponding boxes ticked already.
Improved NOPS language support: Added Czech (cz, Jindřich Marek) and
Galician (gl, Marta Sestelo & Nora M. Villanueva).
New exercise template vowels.Rmd/vowels.Rnw contributed by
Maria Paola Bissiri. This is a cloze exercise with schoice elements
that is particularly well-suited for drop-down menus. It also illustrates
how UTF-8 symbols (for Cardinal vowels)
can be used in an exercise.
Improved exams2canvas() (and underlying exams2qti12()): First, it is
assured that the points per section/exercise are set correctly in the exported
QTI code. Second, extended exstringtype support so that essay questions
and file questions are also possible.
Added new argument exams2moodle(..., forcedownload = FALSE) which when
set to TRUE can force all supplementary links to be downloaded (rather
than opened in the browser). Only supported if pluginfile = TRUE.
If forcedownload = FALSE the behavior typically depends on the browser,
user settings, and file type.
Improvements in read_exercise():
exshuffle now works for cloze questions even if no solutionlist is
provided. Generally, warnings have been improved. In particular, it is now
checked whether the question list contains duplicated items for
single-choice and multiple-choice exercises.##ANSWERi## placeholders it is checked that all
necessary placeholders occur exactly once. Otherwise a warning is issued
about missing and/or duplicated placeholders.Bug fix in extract_environment() underlying read_exercise(): When Markdown
tables were formatted with just --- markup (rather that |---|) some lines
in the table were erroneously forced to lower case (reported by Ulrike Groemping).
Improvement in extract_command() underlying read_exercise(): For Sweave
exercises leading and trailing spaces are now also removed (as they always were for
Markdown exercises, pointed out by Ulrich Morawetz).
Interfaces exams2html(), exams2pdf(), and exams2pandoc() gained an argument
exshuffle = NULL which can be modified to overrule the exshuffle setting
within an exercise (if any). For example, setting exams2xyz(..., exshuffle = FALSE)
retains the full answerlist without any permutation.
When using pandoc as the converter to HTML with multiple options, e.g.,
converter = "pandoc-mathml-ascii", then the options were collapsed to a single
string whereas rmarkdown::pandoc_convert() expects them as a vector (for checking
them). Furthermore, internally, before calling pandoc_convert(), the default for
--wrap is changed to preserved (rather than auto) and for --columns to
99999 (rather than 72) in order to assure that tables are processed correctly,
in particular for PDF output.
Improved formatting in exams2pdf() for cloze exercises with embedded
##ANSWERi## tags. The formatting of the question in that case is improved and the
question list is not displayed anymore - analogously to exams2html().
Bug fix for pandoc-based HTML conversion of LaTeX equations containing \not.
These are now converted to \neq, \nless, \ngtr, \nleq, \ngeq which are handled
by pandoc correctly. Notably, this affects exercise template cholesky.Rmd.
The extol metainformation is now processed more flexibly and reliably in
read_metainfo(): First, it is now enforced to be non-negative.
If a negative value is provided by the exercise, a warning is issued and 0
is used instead. Second, for cloze exercises the length of extol needs to be
either (a) 1 (and is then recycled for all num elements) or (b) the number of
of num elements (and is then matched correspondingly) or (c) the number of all
cloze elements (and then is assumed to match correspondingly).
Improved the string representation in metainfo of exercises and corresponding
printing in print.exams_metainfo(). For cloze exercises tolerances of numeric
elements are reported. For single-choice and multiple-choice exercises lower-case
letters (instead of integer indexes) are used to incide the correct elements
(provided that there are not more than 26 elements).
In all mchoice exercise templates provided within the package it is now assured
that there is at least one correct and one wrong choice item. This is necessary
for some learning management systems like Moodle or Canvas because otherwise they
cannot be scored correctly (specifically when using partial credits). This
necessitated changes in the following exercise templates in the package: anova,
automaton, boxplots, cholesky, relfreq, scatterplot. Consequently, these templates
are not fully backward compatible with their earlier versions. Further improvements
were made in automaton and relfreq.
matrix_to_mchoice() gained a new argument restricted = FALSE which can
be set to TRUE in order to assure that there is at least one correct and one
wrong solution/comparison in the list of choice items. The option
restricted = TRUE is used in the cholesky.Rmd/cholesky.Rnw exercise now.
In exams2pdf() when auto-generating a questionnaire, the _ is now escaped
within the \exstring{} command.
Added envir argument in exams2qti12() and exams2qti21() that is passed on to
xweave(). This allows to re-use variables generated in one exercise in previous
exercises, e.g., for creating a sequence of variables based on the same data set.
However, some learning-management systems do not the drawing of random
questions to the same replication. In that case, this will typically only be useful for
exams with a single random replication. A notable exception are systems based
on QTI 2.1 that can process the output of exams2qti21(..., selection = "exam")
(like OpenOlat).
In xexams() a new argument rds = FALSE was added that indicates whether the
list returned by the function should also be saved as an RDS data file. If
rds = TRUE the file name metainfo.rds is used but alternatively rds
can also be specified as a character file name to be used. The new rds argument
is leveraged in exams2blackboard(), exams2moodle(), exams2pdf(),
exams2html(), exams2qti12(), and exams2qti21(), as well as other interfaces
built on top of these.
To avoid accidental deletion of files in pre-existing temporary directories
xexams() now assures that the tdir is not identical to the output directory
dir or the exercise directory edir. Also, the documentation of tdir in the
manual pages has been made even more explicit.
In {answerlist} definitions for exams2pdf() and exams2nops() the enumii
counter is used correctly now (rather than enumi as in previous versions).
As all templates provided in R/exams aimed to set the counter formatting that
is used by default for enumii in LaTeX (namely (a), (b), ...) the difference
was never noticed up to now.
Tolerate trailing white spaces in section names for environments like question, solution, answerlist, etc. in R/Markdown exercises.
Bug fix in exams2moodle() which did not process pluginfile correctly when
the supplementary files contained a + symbol - as produced by expar()
temporary files. The latter now also use _ instead of + in the file name.
(Reported by Nina Timmesfeld.)
In exams2pdf() it is now assured that name and template are always of the
same length (with a warning if name is too short). (Reported by JPMD.)
When reading {answerlist} environments in read_metainfo() now a warning is
issued if there is further text in the same line as the begin or end of the
environment. Also parsing the individual items now also works tab-indented
items. (Reported by Sebastian Kupek.)
Use gfm instead of the depracated markdown_github to convert to
GitHub-flavored Markdown in exams2arsnova(). As this uses hex encodings for
character entities, the default sep in make_exercise_transform_pandoc()
is changed to a plain ASCII separator.
Improve handling of duplicated graphics file names in exams2pdf() (Reported
by Eduardo Uresti Charre).
In xweave() the highlight = FALSE (default) option is now handled by
actually setting highlight = TRUE in combination with lang = "" for Rmd
exercises. The background for this is that recent versions the LaTeX conversion
of pandoc does not yield {verbatim} environments for text-chunks anymore.
Only plain chunks are converted to {verbatim}.
pandoc availability in nops_language() examples.New function expar() that helps to fix parameters (defined in the first
code chunk of an exercise). For example expar("deriv.Rmd", a = 1, c = 0)
generates a temporary file where the parameters a and c of the
deriv.Rmd exercise are fixed to the values 1 and 0, respectively.
This can then be processed with exams2xyz() "as usual".
Added tinytex::latexmk() as an alternative to tools::texi2dvi() when
converting to PDF output (exams2nops(), exams2pdf(), ...) as suggested
by Yihui Xie. The default is to use tinytex if(requireNamespace("tinytex")).
However, by setting options(exams_tex = "tools") instead of
exams_tex = "tinytex" the old behavior can be enforced even if tinytex
is installed. When no other LaTeX distribution (like TeXLive or MikTeX)
is installed, yet, tinytex::install_tinytex() can easily install the
TeXLive-based TinyTeX system.
Started enabling setting random seeds for each individual exercise
in an exam, to enable custom exercise selection (e.g., when only
putting together a single exam). Currently, only supported in
xexams(), exams2pdf(), exams2html(), exams2nops(), and exams2blackboard().
To make the fixed seeds above applicable to static exercises where
only the exshuffle tag is enabled, the seed is not only set prior
to weaving but also to reading the exercise.
Improved random shuffling if exshuffle is numeric where previously the
correct solution(s) were not completely randomly distributed across the
possible answers.
In addition to the vector or list specification of the exercise file
in the exams2xyz() interfaces, file can now also be a matrix. This
enables customization of the exact selection of exercises in each
exam. The seed can be a matrix of the same dimension. Currently,
only supported in xexams(), exams2pdf(), exams2html(), exams2nops(),
and exams2blackboard().
Improved NOPS language support: Added Korean (ko, Saewon Jeong),
Japanese (ja, Kohei Watanabe), Norwegian (Bokmal, no, Tormod Boe),
Slovenian (sl, Matjaz Jeran), Vietnamese (vi, Tran Thi Hoang Ha).
Some languages require that markboth/pagestyle are set after
\begin{document} and that a \newpage is included directly before
\end{document}, both of which were adapted correspondingly.
Improvements in nops_eval(): Show exam ID in HTML report and round
points to four digits. The language= file paths do not have to be
absolute anymore. For interactive checking/fixing of registration IDs
the width of scanned subimage is now adapted according to the reglength.
The default converter for the HTML report is now "pandoc".
The actual writing of nops_eval() results has been modularized (with contributions
from Kenji Sato). Different nops_eval_write_<flavor> functions can be plugged in.
At the moment there is only the default writer (optimized for OpenOlat)
but further flavors are planned (including a standalone workflow and
one for Moodle).
Function nops_language() is now exported as part of the user interface
(only internal previously). Based on a language specification in a DCF
file this sets up a list with language texts (possibly converted to HTML).
New exercise capitals.Rmd/Rnw that illustrates how a certain number
of true/false items can be chosen randomly from a longer list. The exercise
can also be switched from mchoice to schoice without any further
necessary modifications. Finally, the exercise illustrates that UTF-8
encoding is needed for the Rmd version while in the Rnw version the few
special characters can be coded in ASCII using LaTeX commands.
All LaTeX templates that use \fontfamily{phv} now also gained a
\usepackage{helvet} to ensure that the corresponding LaTeX packages
are installed. When using tinytex (see above) the corresponding LaTeX
packages will be installed if not yet available upon first usage.
In R/Markdown exercises the question/solution answerlist can now use
not only * but also - as the symbol for bullet points (suggested
by Ben Kasel).
Fixed a bug in exams2pdf() where the case of multiple duplicated supplement
names was not handled correctly (reported by TwelveFifths on StackOverflow).
Improved xexams() so that full file paths to exercise files also work on
Windows.
read_metainfo() now assures a non-NULL exname. The default is to use
"R/exams exercise".
Fixed a bug in extract_items() which incorrectly dropped the last element
in an answerlist if it was completely empty (even without a trailing space).
This was a problem for cloze exercises with ##ANSWER## patterns, leading to
a questionlist that was too short (reported by Julia Guggenberger).
Various fixes and improvements in exams2qti21() (and thus inherited by
exams2openolat()): Support of cloze and essay type exercises has been
much improved, fixing bugs in the XML and metainformation handling.
String exercises work again. The internally-generated XML labels are
more robust now avoiding spaces and leading integers.
Dependency on R >= 3.4.0 now which enables plugging a custom svg device
into Sweave(). In previous versions of the package a workaround was
included that works for R < 3.4.0 (but required writing into the global
environment which is avoided now).
pandoc availability.
Currently, the rmarkdown package but not the underlying pandoc support
is installed for the CRAN checks on Solaris and OS X.Added new interface exams2canvas() for the open-source Canvas learning
management system (https://www.instructure.com/canvas). This is essentially
a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12() along with a few Canvas-specific
modifications of the QTI XML specification. The function has only received
limited testing so far and is likely to improve in future version. The
supported exercise types are num, schoice, mchoice, and string (but not
cloze, yet).
The default in exams2moodle() has been changed to converter = "pandoc-mathjax".
Thus, instead of relying on the browser to render mathematical notation
from MathML, the MathJax plugin is now assumed to be enabled on the
Moodle server (which is the default when setting up a new Moodle server).
To employ MathML one can use converter = NULL or converter = "pandoc-mathml"
etc. See the discussion at https://www.R-exams.org/tutorials/math/ for more
details.
exams_skeleton() has been updated. The new default is markup = "markdown"
as this appears to be the more common choice for newcomers to R/exams.
Furthermore, the list of exercises in the demo-*.R scripts has been
updated to use newer exercises as well (along with links to the web
page: https://www.R-exams.org/templates/).
Assure in nops_scan() that scanned image file names contain no spaces.
Fixed bugs in exams2qti21() (and hence exams2openolat()) for certain
combinations of maxchars specifications in string exercises.
Added \usepackage[...]{babel} support to language specification of
exams2nops(). In addition to a new Babel: ... field, the DCF file can
also provide a Header: ... field, e.g., for changing the font encoding
or adding further options.
For convenience, when exams2html(..., converter = "pandoc-mathjax"),
mathjax = TRUE is added automatically (unless explicitly switched off).
Added envir argument in exams2moodle() that is passed on to xweave().
The print() method for exams_metainfo objects received a new block
argument so that print(exams_metainfo(x), which = 1, block = 5) prints
the metainformation (type/solution) of the first exam in the object x
(output from any exams2xyz() function) in blocks of 5 exercises.
For exams2openolat() the handling of the internal pandoc fixups was
extended to replace align="right" in tables with style="text-align: right;"
(and analogously for "left" and "center").
In nops_eval() duplicated sheets (original and replacement) were sometimes
omitted even if the student ID was just 000000 (i.e., not read correctly
by nops_scan()). A check has been added that avoids this.
Changed the default of fix_choice in exams2arsnova(). Current versions of
the official ARSnova server (arsnova.eu) have the LaTeX rendering
in the choice options switched off. Hence, by setting fix_choice = TRUE
by default the LaTeX math markup is removed.
Add \setkeys{Gin}{keepaspectratio} in the default exams2pdf() template for
pandoc (plain8.tex) and in exams2nops(). This is necessitated by a change
in pandoc that now always sets height=\textheight when width= is specified
(see https://pandoc.org/faqs.html).
nops_scan() gained a new argument trim = 0.3 that controls how much of
check boxes is trimmed in order to shave the borders prior to determining
the average gray level. In versions up to 2.3-1 this implicitly had a
value of 0.25 hard-coded. Now the default was increased to 0.3 in order
to shave box borders more reliably.
nops_scan() tries to process registration numbers more reliably.
In case one of the registration columns contains more than one potential
mark, the heuristics of determining the intended mark have been improved.
New exercise confint3.Rmd/Rnw that illustrates how to use the "verbatim"
clozetype for Moodle. The exercises yields 100% of the points for the
correct solution based on t quantiles but still 50% for a partially
correct solution based on normal quantiles (contributed by Ulrike
Groemping).
nops_eval() gained a new argument labels = NULL that can be used to
give labels for the marks that differ from the default
(length(mark) + 1):1.
In all LaTeX templates that use Helvetica (phv) as the font for the main
text, this is also used now in math mode by \usepackage[helvet]{sfmath}
(rather than \usepackage{sfmath}, as employed previously). In particular,
this also affects exams2nops() and tex2image() output.
In exams2nops() the header argument can also be specified simply as
header = "\\mycommand{value}" rather than header = list(mycommand = "value").
The former is more flexible, e.g., for passing additional options or more
complex commands. Internally, the former is turned into an unnamed list
which is then processed correspondingly by exams2pdf().
Various bug fixes in exams2qti21() pertaining to points and correct/incorrect
computations for schoice/mchoice exercises.
New language support in exams2nops: Russian (ru, contributed by
Boris Demeshev) and Serbian (sr, contributed by Tatjana Kecojevic).
Croatian (hr) was streamlined along with Serbian (by Tatjana Kecojevic).
In include_supplement() an argument target = NULL was added to optionally
include the supplement with a different file name than the original
file name.
Bug fix in the pandoc interface which previously erroneously produced
unbalanced
tags in certain situations.
Rather than fully importing the basic dependencies stats, graphics,
grDevices, tools, and utils, the required functions are imported
selectively only. (Issue raised by Florian Oswald.)
Added new interface exams2openolat() for the open-source OpenOlat learning
management system (https://www.openolat.com/). This is only a convenience
wrapper to exams2qti12() or exams2qti21() with some dedicated tweaks
for optimizing MathJax output for OpenOlat.
When using exams2html(..., mathjax = TRUE) for testing purposes,
mathjax.rstudio.com is used now rather than cdn.mathjax.org which
is currently redirecting and will eventually be shut down completely.
Bug fixes and improvements in HTML transformers:
="file.ext" (with =") is replaced now by Base 64 version.href="file.ext" is replaced by href="file.ext" download="file.ext"
prior to Base 64 replacement.alt="file.ext" and download="file.ext" are preserved without
Base 64 encoding.In exams2html() and other interfaces based on make_exercise_transform_html()
base64 = TRUE now uses Base 64 encoding for all file extensions (known
to the package) whereas base64 = NULL only encodes image files (previous
default behavior).
After setting a random seed exams2nops() and exams2pdf() now yield the
same random versions of the exercises. Previously, this was not the case
because exams2nops() internally generates a single random trial exam first for
a couple of sanity checks. Now, the .GlobalEnv$.Random.seed is restored
after generating the trial exam.
Fixed the support for nsamp argument in exams2nops(). Furthermore,
current limitations of exams2nops() are pointed out more clearly and
error messages and edge cases caught.
Include further file URIs for Base 64 supplements, in particular .sav for SPSS data files.
New language support in exams2nops(): Croatian (hr, contributed by
Krunoslav Juraic), Danish (da, contributed by Tue Vissing Jensen & Jakob
Messner), Slovak (sk, contributed by Peter Fabsic), Swiss
German (gsw, contributed by Reto Stauffer), Turkish (tr, contributed by
Emrah Er). Furthermore, Portuguese has been distinguished into
pt-PT (Portuguese Portuguese) vs. pt-BR (Brazilian Portuguese) with
pt defaulting to the former (contributed by Thomas Dellinger).
include_supplement(..., dir = "foo") now also works if "foo" is
sub-directory to the exercise directory (edir).
Allow varying points within a certain exercise in nops_eval().
exams2blackboard(..., base64 = FALSE, ...) was erroneously ignored.
No matter how base64 was specified essentially base64 = TRUE was used,
it is honored again now.
Fixed a bug in stresstest_exercise() where the "rank" (previously called
"order") of the correct solution was computed incorrectly. Enhancement
in plots and labels.
Fixed a bug for tex2image(..., tikz = TRUE) where erroneously
\usetikzlibrary{TRUE} was included. Also tex2image(..., Sweave = TRUE)
(the default) did not run properly on Windows, fixed now.
New function include_tikz() that facilitates compiling standalone
tikz figures and including it in an exercise (especially for
non-LaTeX-based output).
Added support for \tightlist (as produced by pandoc) in all current
LaTeX templates as well as exams2nops().
\exshuffle{<num>} can now also be used for schoice exercises with more
than one true answer. In a first step only one of the true answers is
selected and then <num>-1 items from the false answers.
Better warnings if \exshuffle{<num>} could not be honored due to a lack of
sufficiently many (suitable) answer alternatives.
Enable passing of envir argument from exams2html() to xweave() in
case of Rmd exercises.
Bug fix in CSV export of exams2arsnova(). Recent ARSnova versions use
"mc" (rather than "MC") and "abcd" (rather than "SC") for multiple-choice
and single-choice questions, respectively.
A new web page accompanying the package is now available at https://www.R-exams.org/. This already contains a first overview of the package, some tutorials, and a gallery of all exercise templates provided in the package. More tutorials will follow in the form of blog articles.
A few exercise templates were slightly changed or improved for the new web page. Hence slightly different formulations or formatting may be used in some places.
tex2image() has been rewritten to use the LaTeX class {standalone}
instead of manually handling boxes and cropping of the PDF output.
For converting to raster graphics like PNG (the default), R package
magick is now used rather than system("convert ...") calls to
ImageMagick on the system. For conversion to SVG it is still necessary
to call pdfcrop and pdf2svg on via system().
More fixups in LaTeX code prior to processing with pandoc_convert(),
especially \url{...} is replaced by \href{...}{\texttt{...}} now to
ensure typesetting in typewriter font.
When including R input code chunks in Rmd exercises, code decoration
is switched off by default now (knitr option highlight = FALSE) so that
the output can be combined with standard LaTeX templates. The default
can be changed either in the individual Rmd code chunks, e.g.,
{r, highlight=TRUE}, or by setting highlight = TRUE in the call to
xweave(). For the latter case a new LaTeX template plain-highlight.tex
is also provided, e.g., to be used via:
exams2pdf("lm.Rmd", highlight = TRUE, template = "plain-highlight")
exams2pdf() gained an argument texdir = NULL. By default a temporary
directory is created for running LaTeX (and cleaned up subsequently).
But using texdir = "/path/to/dir" an output directory can be specified
so that the LaTeX files can be inspected, e.g., for debugging.
In exams2pdf() the control argument was extended to encompass a new
cloze.collapse option to fine tune the display of mchoice/schoice
alternatives within a cloze subexercise. By default the separator is
" / " for collapsing the choice alternatives. Alternatively, for example,
it could be set to "\\\\" to add line breaks between the alternatives.
Finally, control = list(cloze.collapse = "enumerate") uses a nested
enumerate environment.
nops_scan() now uses the dir argument not only for the output ZIP
file but also for the input PDF/PNG image files.
exams2pdf() and hence also exams2nops() now try to iconv() the header
information to the specified encoding (if any) rather than relying
on header information (such as institution name etc.) are specified
in LaTeX.
Added new interface exams2pandoc() which can generate a wide variety
of output formats via pandoc. The main purpose is to generate Docx
output files (or ODT). The output format can be controlled through
a template in either LaTeX, HTML, or Markdown format.
New function stresstest_exercise() for "stress testing" of exercises,
i.e., rerunning the exercise many times and capturing how the outcome
depends on the simulated input parameters.
New (and still somewhat experimental) function match_exams_call()
that can be employed to query which exams2xyz() function was called
to create a certain exercise/exam. Only works from R 3.2.0 onwards.
Bug fix in read_exercise() for the case when exshuffle is integer.
This was not correctly reflected in metainfo$length.
Avoid
formatting in questionlist/solutionlist when using
converter = "pandoc" in the conversion to HTML.
Formatting of exercises without "solution" section improved in
exams2html() and exams2moodle().
In exams2qti12() the case of no answer was not handled correctly
if partial = FALSE, negative = ... was used. No answer was handled
as incorrect (= negative points) rather than neutral (= zero points)
but has been fixed now.
Added first release version of exams2blackboard(). This is essentially
based on exams2qti12() but incorporates Blackboard's own flavor of
QTI 1.2. It is still likely to change due to improvements in future
versions. After uploading a test into Blackboard the material will
appear under "Course Tools": The test will be available in "Tests"
and each pool within the test will also appear in "Pools".
Added a new convenience function include_supplement() which facilitates
including static supplement files (e.g., graphics or datasets). This
essentially just calls file.copy() but facilitates finding supplement
files that are available along with the Rnw/Rmd exercise files.
xweave() gained an extra argument svg = FALSE to optionally produce scalable
vector graphics (SVG) instead of PNG for later rendering into HTML. All
HTML-based exams2xyz() functions gained an svg = FALSE argument that can be
set to TRUE to produce SVG instead of PNG. Base64 encoding is also used
for SVG graphics by default.
xweave() gained an argument engine = NULL that can optionally be set to
engine = "knitr" to enable processing Rnw exercises by knitr::knit() instead
of the default utils::Sweave().
exams2nops() now supports registration IDs with more than 7 digits.
Up to now, 7 digits were hard-coded but now values of 8, 9, or 10 are
also possible by setting the argument reglength in exams2nops()
accordingly.
In exams2nops() the argument blank can now be a vector of length 2
with the number of blank pages before and after the extra "pages".
Added arguments samepage = FALSE and twocolumn = FALSE in exams2nops().
If set to TRUE, samepage adds a {samepage} environment around the
question and solution lists in order to prevent page breaks within
these lists. And the twocolumn option, if set to TRUE, is added in
the \documentclass so that the exam is displayed in two-column
format.
New language support in exams2nops(): Hungarian (hu, contributed by
Gergely Daroczi and Denes Toth), Finnish (fi, contributed by Klaus
Nordhausen). Improvements in: Portugese (pt, contributed by Mauricio
Calvao).
Improvements and bug fixes in exams2tcexam(). Various HTML tags are now
supported in the development version by adding a new [html] tag in TCExam.
This has been integrated into UIBK's version of TCExam but is not in the
official release yet.
Fixed a bug in exams2html() with option solution = FALSE or
question = FALSE. Now these correctly suppress the corresponding element
of the exercise. In previous versions only the header had been set to NA
erroneously.
exams2moodle() can now optionally turn "string" exercises in "essay" quiz
items rather than the default "shortanswer". Various customization options
can be set the exextra metainformation. The most important options are
illustrated in the new "essayreg" exercise.
\exshuffle{} can now also be used in read_exercise() for subsampling
rather than permutations only, e.g., via \exshuffle{3}. This first permutes
the alternatives, always uses the first permuted true (if any), the first
permuted false (if any), and then the first remaining alternatives.
This facilitates static schoice/mchoice exercises which have many
alternatives but should only use a limited number (say 5 for exams2nops())
in each random replication.
Bug fix in extract_extra() which prevented exextra metainformation from
being read correctly in the previous version.
Improvement in xexams() to better support using the same exercise template
several times within the same exam (e.g., for generating a single PDF
with multiple versions of the same exercise). The temporary file names
employed are now run through make.unique() first.
Improvement in exams2pdf() to assure that duplication in file names for
graphics (across exercises within the same exam) are handled correctly.
Within several exams2xyz() functions gsub(...) calls were changed to
gsub(..., fixed = TRUE) for replacing placeholders that potentially
have slashes.
Updated exams2arsnova() to assure that \( ... \) instead of $ ... $
is used for inline math. Also the JSON output was augmented with
(almost empty) "publicPool" information to keep current ARSnova versions
happy.
New exercises "deriv"/"deriv2" (both in Rnw and Rmd) that illustrate a simple question about derivatives to be solved by the product rule. The "deriv" exercise is in num format and "deriv2" is the same in schoice (suggested by Martin Obradovits).
The tth/ttm-based HTML conversion now makes sure that empty
question/solution/list elements remain empty and do not introduce line
breaks.
Added copies of num_to_schoice(), num_to_tol(), ... called num2schoice(),
and num2tol(), ...
Exercises can now either be in Rnw format (R/LaTeX, as in previous versions)
or in Rmd format (R/Markdown). A new function xweave() is provided for
weaving either format by either calling utils::Sweave() for Rnw and
knitr::knit() for Rmd. If Rmd exercises are used, the weaved exercises
require conversion by pandoc (see below).
The vignettes have not yet been updated to incorporate the R/Markdown
information or the new interfaces described below. For examples and some
introductory comments, exams_skeleton() can generate demo scripts.
Added new make_exercise_transform_pandoc() transfomer generator, interfacing
rmarkdown::pandoc_convert(). This provides an additional option for generating
HTML output and additionally enables Markdown output (e.g., for ARSnova, see
below).
Added new interface exams2nops() for generating PDF exams that can be
printed, scanned, and automatically evaluated. Accompanying functions
nops_scan() (using the png package) and nops_eval() are provided as well.
The "nops" exams can be internationalized. So far there is language support
for English (en), Dutch (nl, contributed by Niels Smits), French (fr,
contributed by Arthur Allignol), German (de), Italian (it, contributed by
Domenico Zambella), Portuguese (pt, contributed by Fabian Petutschnig),
Romanian (ro, contributed by Cristian Gatu), Spanish (es, contributed by
Maria Kogelnik).
Added new interface exams2arsnova() for exporting exams/quizzes to the
interactive audience response system ARSnova (arsnova.eu). This
can either create JSON output files (via RJSONIO::toJSON) that need to be
manually imported into ARSnova - or the JSON string can directly be imported
into an active ARSnova session (via RCurl).
Added abstention option in schoice/mchoice questions in exams2moodle().
This can also be set directly through an \exabstention{} tag in the
corresponding Rnw exercise.
Added various convenience functions for creating single- or multiple-choice
questions from either a single numeric result (num_to_schoice) or from a
matrix solution (matrix_to_schoice, matrix_to_mchoice, det_to_schoice).
Added various convenience functions for formatting numbers within exercises:
fmt() for conveniently displaying a certain number of digits, round2()
for rounding away from zero, char_with_braces() for adding braces to negative
numbers, and a toLatex() method for "matrix" objects.
tex2image() now also supports format = "svg" via pdfcrop followed by pdf2svg
(instead of ImageMagick's convert).
Fixed bug in file paths created for "media" supplements in QTI XML formats. File names had an unnecessary trailing slash which lead to unrecognized suffixes in some browsers.
Added an optional transform = NULL argument in exams2pdf().
Avoid require(...) calls for suggested packages.
The default encoding in exams2moodle() is now ensured to be "UTF-8" rather
than "utf8" for improved cross-platform compatibility.
\exshuffle{TRUE} is now also used in read_exercise() so that schoice/mchoice
exercises (or schoice/mchoice components in cloze exercises) are shuffled
upon reading exercises. This facilitates static schoice/mchoice exercises.
New cloze type "verbatim" which is not processed further (e.g., to include Moodle control structures).
Empty questionlists for readily prepared Moodle cloze exercises can now
be handled in exams2pdf().
Functions from non-imported packages (e.g., only suggested) are now always called with package::function to make R-devel checks happy.
Bug fix in processing of duration in exams2qti12().
New version accompanying publication of exams version 2 in the
Journal of Statistical Software, 58(1), 1-36. See
vignette("exams2", package = "exams") for more details.
License extended from GPL-2 to GPL-2 | GPL-3.
New exams2qti21() interface for generating QTI 2.1 (rather than QTI 1.2)
XML. So far this was only tested with the ONYX Player within
OpenOLAT. Currently, some switches do not appear to fully work, yet,
at least within ONYX. The function still needs further thorough
testing and might be further improved in future versions.
Added verbose = FALSE option to xexams() and exams2xyz() interfaces.
If set to TRUE, progress information on the exam generation is
printed.
The XML output in exams2qti12() sometimes did not yield fully correct
QTI 1.2 output. This has been fixed now and test output was validated
against the QTI 1.2 DTD.
Added a new pluginfile = TRUE option in exams2moodle(). By default,
supplementary files (graphics, data files, etc.) are now included using
Moodle's Pluginfile mechanism. This may not work with older versions of
Moodle (< 2.5) but in newer versions it is better and more robust than
using data URIs.
Added fix_num = TRUE option in exams2qti12() interface.
Because OLAT does not display the correct answer of response_num
items with tolerances (vargt/varlt), a workaround was added:
In addition to the version with tolerances an exact equality
is checked (varequal), adding and removing a 0.00001 points.
Thus, evaluation of the exams is not affected but the display
in OLAT is fixed.
The {answerlist} in the {solution} environment can now also be
omitted (in mchoice, schoice, cloze exercises). It is still recommended
to include it but all exams2xyz() interfaces can process exercises
correctly that do not provide it.
tests/encodings.R to use encoding = "Latin-9" (rather
than "latin9" which does not work on Solaris, see ?iconv).The new function exams_skeleton() helps users to create their first
exam. It creates a directory with a demo.R script illustrating the
use of the various exams2xyz() interfaces. Subdirectories with
copies of all demonstration exercise Rnw files and templates for
different output formats (LaTeX, HTML, or XML) are also created.
Encodings are now explicitly supported by all exams2xyz() interfaces.
Essentially, the encoding argument is just passed on to Sweave()
and the user has to make sure that the template (for LaTeX, HTML,
or XML output) has the appropriate encoding. exams_skeleton()
also supports this and especially the encoding UTF-8 is now fully
integrated. The encodings ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) or ISO-8859-15
(aka latin9) have also been tested while other encodings may need
further touch-ups. Furthermore, the developers recommend to not
rely on encodings but to code special characters with their
LaTeX commands because these work in all locales on all platforms.
The new function exams_eval() captures various types of evaluation
policies for exams (with/without partial credits for multiple choice,
with/without negative points). The resulting functions aid generation
of e-learning exams or evaluation of an exam "by hand".
If the edir argument is specified in exams2xyz(), then all
files in edir and its subdirectories are searched recursively.
Asymmetric tolerance intervals are not supported in the exams2xyz()
interfaces anymore. Instead, vectors of solutions in cloze
exercises can have vectors of tolerances.
The original exam.tex/solution.tex templates have been renamed to
oexam.tex/osolution.tex. The function exams() needs to be used
with oexam/osolution while exam/solution are now optimized for
exams2pdf(). The reason is that the questionnaire command has
been changed. For a multiple-choice question with five answers
and correct solutions 1 and 4, say, exams() produces
\exmchoice{X}{ }{ }{X}{ } while exams2pdf() now uses
\exmchoice{X}[ ][ ][X][ ], i.e., with optional instead of required
arguments. The latter solution is not restricted to multiple-choice
questions with exactly five answers anymore.
find.package() rather than .find.package()
internally (as the latter will be deprecated soon).exams2pdf().
The lack of .tex suffixes led to errors on certain Windows systems.New demo exercises:
confint2.Rnw shows how a confidence interval can be embedded into a
cloze question (for all version 2 interfaces).dist.Rnw is a very short and simple example that is intelligible
across a wide range of disciplines (not for statistics audiences only).dist2.Rnw is an extension of dist.Rnw that is written as a cloze.Questions in exams2moodle() were forced to be
-formatted, now embedded in normal HTML (withouttags).
Supplementary files had not been correctly inferred on Solaris systems. This has been fixed now so that the package behaves the same across different platforms.
The code underlying the old "exams" vignette now avoids opening PDF
viewers.
exams package, adding flexible support for
generation of exams in different formats including PDF, HTML,
Moodle XML, and QTI 1.2 (for OLAT). This new version of the exams
package (called "version 2") is described in a new vignette:
vignette("exams2", package = "exams")Added an {answerlist} environment in the LaTeX templates (inst/tex)
so that each \item in the {answerlist} is automatically labeled
with (a), (b), (c), ...
Replaced the old {itemize} environments with {answerlist} in
anova.Rnw, boxplots.Rnw, relfreq.Rnw, scatterplot.Rnw, ttest.Rnw.
(The resulting PDFs do not change.)
nsamp was added to exams() in order to allow
sampling more than one exercise from each element of the
argument file.The man page of exams() was modified to use suitable markup commands.
The questions in the ANOVA example were slightly changed to more explicitly indicate which hypothesis is tested. A typo in the vignette was fixed.
New version accompanying publication in the Journal of
Statistical Software. See vignette("exams", package = "exams")
for more details.
New CITATION file pointing to the JSS paper, see
citation("exams").
The possible types of questions were extended to allow also text results. The new type is specified by "string".
To specify the allowed tolerance for numeric solutions now
different tolerances can be supplied for falling below or
exceeding the true value via \extol{lower}{upper}.
The "discussion" section in the vignette was extended to include several remarks and pointers on strategies for exercise generation.
First CRAN release version.
New vignette("exams", package = "exams") that explains how to use the package.
New set of exercises for illustation in examples and vignette.