qpt_generator

An implementation of Question Paper Template Generation Algorithm written in C++ to provide high performance. It uses Cython internally to create python package.

Introduction

Generation of question papers through a question bank is an important activity in learning management systems and educational institutions. The quality of question paper is based on various design constraints such as whether a question paper assesses different problem solving skills as per Bloom's taxonomy, whether it covers all units from the syllabus of a course and whether it covers various difficulty levels.

I have implemented algorithm written by Vaibhav M. Kale and Arvind W. Kiwelekar for question paper template generation in C++ to provide fast performance. Implementation is extensible in terms of constriant it support to create question paper template.

The qpt_generator package was motivated by the needs of my academic project Question Paper Generator.

Installation

You can install qpt_generator using easy_install with following command:

pip install qpt-generator

or

easy_install qpt-generator

Usage

After installing module, you can import it using following command:

from qpt_generator import QPTGenerator

You have to provide two inputs to the constructor of QPTGenerator:

1. A dictionary of constraints and lists of distribution of mark
   Ex: if you want to generate paper with 4 constraint:

• Unit-wise distribution of marks
• Difficulty level-wise distribution of marks
• Cognitive level-wise distribution of marks
• Question-wise distribution of marks

2. A list of question no. associated with list of question-wise mark distributions. Repitition of same question no. indicates subquestions of that question.

Output will be generated when you call generate method of the QPTGenerator class. Here, output is a dictionary of list of the alloted unit, cognitive level, difficulty and mark by question no.

from qpt_generator import QPTGenerator
mark_distributions = {
    "question": [5, 5, 10, 4, 6, 5, 5],
    "unit": [8, 8, 8, 5, 11],
    "difficulty": [13, 15, 12],
    "cognitive": [12, 18, 10],
}
question_no = [1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4]
qpt = QPTGenerator(mark_distributions, question_no)
output = qpt.generate()

# output = {'cognitive': [2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 1, 2],
#           'difficulty': [3, 1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 3, 1, 2, 3],
#           'question': [5, 5, 8, 2, 2, 1, 1, 6, 5, 5],
#           'question_no': [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4],
#           'unit': [4, 5, 1, 3, 2, 2, 3, 5, 2, 3]}

To satisfy all given constraints: question 1 should have 2 subquestions:

• first question should have cognitive_level = 2, difficulty = 3, unit no.= 4 and mark = 5
• second question should have cognitive_level = 3, difficulty = 1, unit no.= 5 and mark = 5

You can randomly select this kind of questions from your question bank database if it exists.

References

1. An Algorithm for Question Paper Template Generation in Question Paper Generation System