Automatic Generation of Examinations in the Automatic Control Courses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decision support toolkit that automates the generation of exams in automatic control courses, using randomization and manual selection to align assessments with course objectives.

Contribution

It presents a novel Stepwise Constructive Alignment method and a Matlab-LATEX toolkit for automatic exam problem selection and generation.

Findings

Automated exam generation reduces preparation time.

The toolkit successfully creates aligned exams with solutions.

Manual intervention ensures quality control during automation.

Abstract

Final written examination is the most important part of summative assessment in automatic control courses. Preparation of the examinations with a given number of points according to the concept of Constructive Alignment (which could be the main concept in future automatic control education) takes significant amount of time of the educator and motivates development of a toolkit for automatic compilation of examination problems. A decision support Matlab-LATEX toolkit based on random number generators for selection of examination problems is described in this report to facilitate the alignment. The toolkit allows application of Stepwise Constructive Alignment (a new method described in this report), where the alignment is achieved by a number of software runs associated with random trials. In each step the educator manually selects suitable problems before each run based on evaluation of the random choice from the previous run. Automatic generation of the examination together with solutions for the course 'Process control and measurement techniques' is presented as an example.