Software For:

Riddel assessment software is a windows based program for assignments, tests and exams.

Features

Secure

Stable

Windows based

Retrieving and feedback

File based, names and numbers are incorporated in the test

Arranged in pages

Design own interface (fonts, colours and background)

High quality graphics

Link sound and video

Wide variety of MCQ's, lists, tables, X word puzzle, type in, freeform hotspot and essay questions

Files can be put in series

Randomized pages

Test generates a marked script and a unique code

Editing and a reader version

Allows for quick marking of type in and essay questions

Statistical analysis

The software:

This program is being used for tests, exams, assignments and self-assessment for 12 years.
During this period the program was constantly improved, and features were added as suggested by the people that were using the program.
The program is file based. You set up a test, starting with a blank file.
This process is offline similar to creating a presentation.
Questions from previous test or from a text file can be imported into the test.
Once the test is completed (it can be password protected) it can be given to anybody which uses Windows and has installed a reader on their computer.
Names and student numbers are incorporated into the test.
The program will generate a unique code which can be decoded to get the mark scored.
It will also, if the option is selected, generate a marked script.
This script can be in a coded format so that the student cannot see the results.
This can then be send back to the lecturer who can decode it for marking (if needed) and for statistical analysis.
If the test is put on a network, it will write the script to a selected space on the network.
These scripts can then be imported into a file called an extractor where marking, modification (fixing of possible errors in the test) and statistics can be done.

Issues Concerning CBT:

A test counts 100 and it consists of 100 questions, each with 4 distractors.
If a student that knows 40 of the answers (if an answer is known it does not matter how many distractors there are) write the test,
the other 60 questions will be guessed resulting in an additional 15 (20% because of the 4 distractors) correct answers.
This will give the student a mark of 55% instead of 40%.
The number of distractors thus play an important role in the results of the test.
Many lecturers use 3, 4 or 5 distractors due to guessing resulting in an inflated mark.
One solution is to do negative marking.
What do you subtract for an incorrect answer., .25, .5 or 1 mark?
The other way of fixing the inflated mark obtained by 3, 4 or 5 distractor questions is to apply a standard setting.
There are different methods like Angoff’s which uses subject experts to judge difficulty and Cohen’s method that uses 60%
of the 95th percentile student but or the modified Cohen method that uses the 90th percentile. So which system should you use?
We tried to solve the problem by firstly asking questions where the distractors are not needed to answer the question.
Doing this the number of distractors can be increased to more that 20.
So a user reads the question decide what the answer is and go and find it in an alphabetical list of distractors.
Some questions with distractors are not really mcq questions like if you ask in which month something happened and you give all 12 months as distractors or if you ask which African country,
and you give all the African countries as distractors.
The most popular question type with this tool is the page where more than one question (up to 10) is asked and the distractors are all grouped together is a single distractor box.
Some answers are difficult to hide between distractors and should be asked as type in answers.
The program has a function where a list is created containing all the different answers given by the students for that specific question.
The lecturer then marks the answers in the list by clicking on the correct answers. The more overlapping of answers there are the less there is to mark.

Assignments:

During the lockdown universities in South Africa had many problems with online teaching due to the fact that many students did not have internet. This is because they live in areas where there is no signal, or a weak signal or data is to expensive.
Riddel assignments can be preloaded, e mailed, shared on DropBox or Google drive or put on the LMS for a quick download. Access is controlled by making passwords available at certain times. Assignments can be linked up so that assignment 2 cannot be done before a set score (e.g. 80%) was achieved with assignment 1. An unlimited number of assignments can be linked up in this way. A valid code from the last assignment thus means that all assignments were completed successfully.