📝 Random Teacher

    An approach to generate random tests automatically.

One of the problems that hinder learning is cheating in assessments and exams. Researchers found that:

• 64 percent of students admitted to cheating on a test,
• 58 percent admitted to plagiarism,
• 95 percent said they participated in some form of cheating (1).

Although improving student morale is one avenue, we can look for ways that have a great impact and prevent a wide spectrum of cases. We start from the basic premise: "A student who knows that he cannot cheat will be more willing to learn the right way".

This is how 📝 Random Teacher arises, a code-based approach that allows you to create evaluations procedurally, that is, create random evaluations using algorithms written in python.

Advantages

• Create unique exercises for students or groups.
• Very difficult to copy through traditional strategies.
• Create new material periodically with minimal effort.
• Motivate students to learn by discouraging non-legal methods.
• Have a more objective measure of individual / group performance.

How to use it?

• Clone the repo.

• Create the environment and install packages. (This can change if you are using Windows)

    python3 -m venv math_tests
    source math_tests/bin/activate
    python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
    python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Execute the random teacher command. With this instruction, we can generate the files for the statistics module statistics_m1

    python main.py --module statistics_m1
  

• Output

    ===== 📝 Random Teacher =====
            Creating module statistics_m1.
            10 new distributions were created with their solutions.
            Questions saved in: data/statistics_module1_questions.docx
            Answers saved in: data/statistics_module1_solutions.docx
            The module was created succesfully.
  

• If you want to generate documents from all the available modules, you can execute without specifying a module:

    python main.py
  

The CLI will use a default argument 'all' to create all the modules.

Result

An example of the expected result will be two documents. Solutions and Questions documents:

Random questions

Random solutions

List of available modules

• statistics_m1

How to collaborate with the project

Every new module must be defined in a class that follows the interface writer_interface.py. The module must create new questions (or hard to repeat questions) every time is executed. You must read the interface to identify the logic for the methods. The requirements are:

• Create a fork of the repo.

• Your module must be defined inside a class in the writers folder.

• The class must be named following this format: SubjectExampleModuleN.

• The class must save the output documents in the data folder.

• It is not mandatory, but it is suggested to use the python-docx module to create the documents in docx format.

• Add your new module to the dictionary in line 7 in main.py (in this example, your module is SubjectExampleModuleN):

    MODULES = {
            "statistics_m1": StatisticsModule1,
            "subject_example_module_n": SubjectExampleModuleN
            }
  

• Use Flake8 and Black packages for linting and autolinting.

• Your code must use type hints.

• Document the code using the Google Python Style Guide as reference. If you use VSCode, you can install the Python Docstring Generator extension and configure for Google style.

• Create a pull request from a fork with a branch named subject_example_module_n.

If it meets the requirements, the new module can be added to the list of modules available to be executed from the command line.

References

[1] McCabe, D. L., Butterfield, K. D., & Trevino, L. K. (2012). Cheating in college: Why students do it and what educators can do about it. JHU Press.

Notes

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