System for Preparing and Executing Math Exams Online – A Case Study

When teaching remotely, it is much more difficult to supervise students’ independent task solving during tests. Students have almost unlimited opportunities to communicate both among themselves and with third parties. From the experience of one of the authors of the paper as a mathematics teacher there are often cases of exchange of solutions between students. Such cheating attempts often feature omitting key elements of the solution and nevertheless receiving correct results or duplicating unusual errors. During the COVID pandemic when the system has prepared the scale of such behaviors was noticeably bigger. Remote learning makes it ever more challenging to effectively teach and verify progress. When remotely administering tests, it is easy to identify some of the problems that affect both students and teachers. Some of them are cheating and sharing solutions, problems with timely delivery of assignments and increased time it takes to grade submitted solutions compared to ones received on paper. System described in this paper proposes a novel approach to increasing the number of groups at the test. The assumption was that increasing the number of groups along with automated preparation of different data in the tasks for each student can make it much more difficult to exchange solutions between students. Automatic assignment variant generation and support for grading of mathematics tests could reduce the teacher’s time to prepare and grade the tests as well as increase the confidence in students working individually. These assumptions were verified by a survey among science teachers before the development of the system and as part of its testing. A similar thesis was proposed and partially confirmed in for tests in computer science in higher education.