An Add-On for Empowering Google Forms to be an Automatic Question Generator in Online Assessments

TL;DR

This paper presents an add-on for Google Forms that automatically generates multiple-choice questions for online assessments, aiming to reduce instructor effort and produce high-quality, concept-based MCQs.

Contribution

The novel add-on combines question-formulating software and data storage to automatically generate analytical-level MCQs from minimal input data.

Findings

MCQs assess student knowledge comparably to expert-generated questions

The add-on can generate diverse MCQs from simple concept descriptions

It reduces instructor effort in creating assessment questions

Abstract

This research suggests an add-on to empower Google Forms to be an automatic machine for generating multiple-choice questions (MCQs) used in online assessments. In this paper, we elaborate an add-on design mainly comprising question-formulating software and data storage. The algorithm as an intellectual mechanism of this software can produce MCQs at an analytical level. In an experiment, we found the MCQs could assess levels of students' knowledge comparably with those generated by human experts. This add-on can be applied generally to formulate MCQs for any rational concepts. With no effort from an instructor at runtime, the add-on can transform a few data instances describing rational concepts to be variety sets of MCQs.