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Ham Radio Test

Motivation

I've been meaning to develop a generic multi-choice application in XQuery/XSLT, both as a teaching example and to use for revison. One of my exams uses multiple-choice questions and the students would welcome more practice. I don't need a fully-fledged grading system, which Blackboard provides anyway, so a simple interface to let students check their own understanding will be useful.

Background

WA5ZNU has formated the question bank for the Ham Radio Technician Test into XML and then used XForms with Alain Couthures XSLT implementation to create an interface to the questions which allows the reader to page through the question bank and to either see or hide the correct answers.

• Question pool in Word,PDF or text
• Question bank in XML
• Web page
• Questions with answers revealed

Restructured XML

There are a few improvement which can be made to the original XML:

• The syllabus section is redundant - it contains the same information as in the question bank structure.
• The titles for subelements and groups contain the identifier for the element as part of the text. It is preferable to separate these out into different elements. Since they are unique ids, they are better as attributes.
• Questions have a number element but since this is an id too, it becomes an attribute of the question.

I had to make a few hand edits to insert missing hyphens in a few places

• Edited XML
• Restructure
• XQuery Code This could be done in XSLT too
• Restructured Question Bank XML

Leigh (WA5ZNU ) took these suggestions on hand, edited the XML for a few more typos and that is now the version in use here.

XSLT Implementation : Version 1

This approach uses XSLT with the Saxon engine and XQuery running on the eXist database. XQuery is used here only to connect the XML file , the XSLT script and any parameters from the URL.

Transformations are done on the server whereas the XForms approach uses the Browser only. However if the platform is available, XQuery/XSLT offer some advantages. In particular the site is searchable and linkable.

The specific question group displayed is set by a parameter to the XQuery script.

• XSLT
• With Answers
• Without Answers
• XQuery code

XQuery/XSLT implementation : Version 2

To allow the viewer to reveal the answer to a chosen question, I added hide/show coding (XSLT & JavaScript).

• XSLT
• Test with reveal on answers
• XQuery code

Index

We can generate an index of the Groups in the Question bank with XSLT and apply this server-side or client side (since it is un-parameterised)

• XSLT
• Index

Marking

Adding a form and some radio buttons to the Question sheet, and doing a little XQuery to get the answers gives us an interactive quiz.

• XSLT
• XQuery code
• Index linked to the marking sheets

Generalization

The XML format will do for other quizes as well. In fact there is no dependency on the number of responses so they are not restricted to be exactly 4 or the same number for each question. The main change is parameterization of the location of the XML question bank document. The subElement /Group terminology will need parameterising too.

Care is needed over the scoping of identifiers. In the Radio test, all ids (SubElement, Group and Question) are unique within the question pool. There are places where this property is used but Question id could be local to a group without much (or any change).

To do

• Compute the mark in XSLT. XSLT does this but if marks were to be recorded, they would need to be computed in XQuery before logging them.
• Linking to the next test in sequence
• linking a question to reference/revision material
• Annotating the test index with the current scores
• Include diagrams
• include XHTML preable - for a sequence of questions which need an introduction
• Printable format of a question sheet
• Easier scolling through the questions - could checking a radio button trigger a scroll to the next question?
• Recording marks for a student - requires login
• Comparison of XQuery/XForms approach