Maple T.A. Makes Online Testing and Assignments Easy

Five thousand freshmen students are coming to your campus this fall. Although you are looking forward to the new wave of eager minds, their arrival bodes a Herculean task for you and your colleagues in the Mathematics Department. In batches of several hundred, you will herd them into auditoriums across campus. There dozens of proctors will administer a paper and pencil placement test that decides which math course each freshman should take. Your department will have ordered 5,000 paper copies of the test from a now overjoyed printing company. Faculty will have spent hours creating multiple versions of the test to hinder (they hope) neighbouring students from trading answers. After the test, still more staff will have to run 5,000 multiple-choice answer sheets through the scanner.

But many hours and dollars later, the hard questions linger. Will the test place each student in the right course? How many test takers will guess or cheat their way into multivariable calculus but wouldn't know a cosine from a stop sign? Can a multiplechoice test really gauge a student's grasp of mathematical concepts? Maple T.A. is about to free schools from the cost, effort and limitations of paper-andpencil assessment.

Maple T.A. is a web-based assessment and teaching software product from Maplesoft, now in pilot stage. With it, instructors can create online mathematics tests, assignments and practice sessions that are graded by the Maple engine. Students take the tests through a standard web browser, while a Maple engine running on the Maple T.A. server automatically grades the assignment as soon as the student submits it. They can enter their responses either by clicking buttons from a palette of math symbols or by typing scientificcalculator syntax into a text box. The student environment of an online exam created in Maple T.A. Students can enter their responses from a symbolic math palette.

Maple T.A. opens the door to free-form questions like ...

"Find the union of the sets {a, b, c, d} and {b, e, c, f}," or

"Give an example of an increasing function on the interval [0, 1]."

In the design of the second question, for example, you can have the Maple server automatically check whether the derivative of the student's response is nonnegative on [0, 1].

Maple T.A. also allows randomised questions, which obviates the manual creation of multiple versions of a test. In the first example above, you could either have Maple T.A. generate random elements in the sets, pick sets at random from a collection that you specify in advance, or have the Maple server generate random sets of random size. Thus, during an exam, every student would see a slightly different version of the question. During a practice session, a student could repeat an exercise with different parameters.

You can also include Maple plots inside Maple T.A. questions. For example, you could give students a 3-D plot of a function f(x,y) and ask them to pick the contour plot that matches it. You can even combine the plotting and randomisation features within the same question. A question that asks students to find the area of a given trapezoid could generate random lengths for the sides and then have Maple plot and label the resulting trapezoid. Or you could show the graph of a random polynomial and ask students to infer the polynomial from the picture. To make the task manageable but not trivial, you could tell Maple T.A. to use only integer coefficients and pick the degree between three and five. Maplesoft is now soliciting participation in pilot testing of Maple T.A. If your school would like to pilot this technology, please contact bizdev@maplesoft.com.

Article: Maple T.A. Makes Online Testing and Assignments Easy