AUTOMATED GENERATION OF TESTS FOR EDUCATION IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

An important and time consuming part of work in education belongs to the preparation and correction of exams for learners. Generating questions and tasks for exams or self-tests in an automated or at least semi-automated manner would optimize the work for teachers. In best-case, the test generation method would consider topics which have been taught as well as the complexity and relevance of different topics. Moreover, for several types of questions like multiple choice, mapping and order of answers or cloze an automated rating of correct answers is helpful. Especially in the area of software engineering types and numbers of parameters, modules or specification versions can change in short time intervals. However, the initial structure of the question can be the same and does not need to be modified in contrast specific adaptions for answers. For this reason, a database providing information about these differences integrated into the test generation would be helpful. We present a concept for automated generation of questions and tasks in the area of software engineering. This process is based on a knowledge base, containing architectural knowledge like modules, functions and so on. Owning this knowledge is very important for software engineers beside the normal programming skills and abstract thinking. An efficient teaching approach in this area is the usage of animations. Workflows and sequences of computer systems are represented step by step by graphical effects within the animations. Essential data for the animations are traced and recorded before in a real and specific scenario defined by the teacher. By that it is easy for a teacher to focus learners on concrete topics of the learning content. The test generation considers the learning content shown in the animations and controls different types of questions. After generating questions, the teacher is free to change the multilingual text, credits and answer possibilities as well as adding questions from former generation procedure or manual created questions. Connecting our prototype to an E-assessment software will enable the usage of features like evaluation, storage of tests and procedure of tests.