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Switched the entire package to support UTF-8 encodings by default
for all exercises types. Previously, this was only the case for .Rmd
exercises due to the UTF-8 requirement of pandoc (which is
now a system requirement for exams). All templates etc.
have been modified to support UTF-8 out-of-the-box. Support for all
other encodings like ISO-8859-* (latin1, latin9, etc.), which had
previously been available for .Rnw exercises in certain interfaces, has
been disabled. While this reduces the functionality of the package
slightly, it greatly facilitates working with UTF-8 which appears to be
predominantly used in practice. Documentation also becomes
easier/clearer.
To facilitate working with .Rmd exercises and embedded graphics
or data files base64enc, knitr, and
rmarkdown are now imported in the package (and not just
suggested).
Several extensions in exams2qti21() (and thus
inherited by exams2openolat()) that provide more control
and options in the assessments.
cutvalue (for passing a
test/exam/quiz). By default, this is cutvalue = NULL (or
equivalently cutvalue = NA) which means that no pass/fail
status is computed at all, i.e., only the sum of the points is reported.
Moreover, cutvalue may be a float now and is not coerced to
an integer anymore (also applied in exams2qti12()).navigation = "nonlinear". This can be
switched to "linear" enforcing that questions in the test
must be answered sequentially while the default "nonlinear"
means that participants can switch back and forth between
questions.selection = "pool" that controls how
exercises and sections are sampled. By default, the function creates one
section for each exercise from which one replication will be selected in
the exam. If selection = "exam" each section contains all
questions and one section will be selected for the exam. The
"exam" variant has the advantage that nsamp
can be fully used now and that questions that build on each other can be
used in the exam.shufflesections = FALSE can be set to
TRUE in order to randomly shuffle the order of
sections/exercises for each participant. For
selection = "pool" this corresponds to shuffling the
sections that contain the pools of exercises. For
selection = "exam" it corresponds to shuffling the
exercises within each exam section.cloze_schoice_display = "auto" that
controls the display of schoice elementsin
cloze exercises. By default, radio "buttons"
are used if the answer list appears in its own paragraph and a
"dropdown" menu is used if the answer list appears inline
(and has no mathematical markup). Both options can also be enforced
explicitly, independently from the answer list appearing in a separate
paragraph or inline.allowskipping = TRUE controlling whether
exercises can be skipped without answering (default) or must be
answered.allowreview = FALSE controlling whether
exercises can be viewed again at the end of a test/exam.allowcomment = FALSE can be set to
TRUE to allow comments.casesensitive = TRUE that controls whether
the evaluation of string exercises is case sensitive or not.stitle (section title) and
ititle (item title) are now NULL so that items
are simply numbered consecutively (1, …, n) and section titles are
omitted.sdescription is now empty
omitting the section description as it is typically not necessary.solutionswitch = TRUE and
maxattempts != 1 a warning is issued now. This is because
with more than one attempt participants could otherwise copy the
solution shown after an incorrect first attempt.maxattempts can now be a vector so that different
numbers of attempts per question are allowed for different
sections/questions.An extended list of configuration options for OpenOlat
assessments is now provided through the argument
config = TRUE in exams2openolat(). The logical
specification config = TRUE/FALSE uses the
default configuration or switches off the extra configuration entirely,
respectively. Moreover, a list of options like
config = list(cancel = TRUE, scoreprogress = TRUE) can be
provided for customizing how OpenOlat renders the QTI 2.1
content.
Several extensions for cloze questions in
exams2moodle():
mchoice elements in cloze questions are
now properly supported. By default they are shown as
MULTIRESPONSE checkboxes and employ Moodle’s default
evaluation strategy where each incorrect box eliminates one correct box.
A different evaluation strategy can, in principle, be chosen but Moodle
might not process all negative points correctly.schoice elements in cloze questions are
still rendered as MULTICHOICE drop-down menus by default
unless they contain math markup. As this is not rendered by Moodle in
drop-down menus, a MULTICHOICE_V column of radio buttons is
used in this case.mchoice and
schoice elements in cloze questions, the are
now both cloze_mchoice_display and
cloze_schoice_display arguments. This is not fully backward
compatible because in previous versions
cloze_mchoice_display was also used to customize
schoice elements. Now a warning is issued in this
case.cloze
questions which relies on curly brackets. Hence, these are properly
escaped now.string items (SHORTANSWER) needed to be
properly escaped.num and/or string sub-items (e.g., when
presented in a table), arguments numwidth and
stringwidth have been added to
make_question_moodle(). Alternatively, they can also be
specified through exextra tags in each exercise. See the
fourfold2 exercise for an example and
?make_question_moodle for more details.For illustrating the new improved cloze capabilities in
exams2moodle() and
exams2qti21()/exams2openolat(), there is a new
exercise “lm2” which combines all basic exercise types:
num, schoice, mchoice, and
string. Another extended version of this exercises, called
“lm3”, has also been added which adds essay (text editor)
and file upload interactions (see also below).
Extended processing of string exercises for learning
management systems like Moodle, OpenOlat, or other QTI-based systems. By
default, string exercises are intended for closed-format
short-text answers that have to be matched exactly by the participants.
Additionally, open-ended text answers can now be enabled by setting the
stringtype meta-information to essay and/or
file. The former requests a text editor for entering an
answer while the latter requests a file upload dialogue. The “essayreg”
exercise has been modified to leverage this new
meta-information.
Similarly, the exclozetype meta-information now also
accepts essay or file instead of
string for elements of a cloze exercise.
Currently, the combination of these types with num or
schoice elements etc. is only possible for QTI-based
systems (i.e., OpenOlat in particular) but not for Moodle (whose cloze
format does not support open-ended text answers). For illustration, see
the new “essayreg2” and “lm3” exercises.
Added new interface exams2ilias() for the
open-source ILIAS learning management system (https://www.ilias.de/).
This is essentially a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12(),
tweaking a few defaults and employing a somewhat modified XML template.
Not all question types are supported, though, mostly string questions
with open-ended answers and multiple-choice and single-choice questions.
Numeric and cloze questions are not supported, yet.
Added first release version of new interface
exams2testvision() for the Dutch testing platform TestVision. It is essentially a
fork of exams2qti21() that incorporates TestVision’s own
strict implementation of QTI 2.1. See the online
tutorial on how to upload the zip output from
exams2testvision() into the system by selecting it in the
import menu and then moving the imported material to the appropriate
directories. The work on the function was financially supported by the
Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Project code OL20-06),
and the University of Amsterdam.
Added first release version of new interface
exams2grasple() for Grasple, a Dutch practice platform
for mathematics and statistics education. It supports num
and schoice questions which are exported to a zip file
containing Grasple’s
JSON format. Note that currently importing cannot be done by users
themselves; it requires a request for manual import by a Grasple team
member. The work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch
Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Project code OL20-06), and
the University of Amsterdam.
Added new interface exams2particify() that can
export exercises to a comma-separated values (CSV) format for import in
the audience response system Particify (https://particify.de/), the successor to ARSnova. In
particular, single-choice and multiple-choice exercises are fully
supported while num and string question are converted to open-ended text
questions.
Added new interface exams2kahoot() that can export
sufficiently simple single-choice and multiple-choice exercises to an
Excel sheet via openxlsx::write.xlsx() that can be imported
by the game-based learning platform Kahoot! at https://kahoot.com/
(suggested by Rushad Faridi). Exercises are converted to plain text and
questions must not exceed 120 characters, answers must not exceed 75
characters.
New experimental function moodle2exams() that can
take a Moodle XML quiz file with numeric, multichoice, shortanswer, and
essay exercises and convert them to R/exams exercise files, either in
R/Markdown (Rmd, default) or R/LaTeX (Rnw) format. If the text
formatting is more advanced (e.g., containing mathematical notation or
tables etc.) the function might not lead to fully satisfactory results
but still provide a useful starting point for subsequent manual
editing.
New function testvision2exams() to convert
TestVision’s QTI 2.1 questions to R/exams exercise files, either in
R/Markdown (Rmd, default) or R/LaTeX (Rnw) format. The supported
TestVision question types are ‘invul (numeriek)’, ‘een-uit-meer’,
‘meer-uit-meer’, and ‘open’ which are converted to num,
schoice, mchoice, and string,
respectively.
When running exercises via knitr::knit() errors in
the R code will stop the evaluation now by default. This was always the
default behavior for Rnw exercises (i.e., when processed with
engine = "sweave") but now is also the default for Rmd
exercises and for Rnw exercises via engine = "knitr". In
exercises processed via knitr::knit() it is possible to
carry on with code evaluation after errors (the default in
knitr) by setting the chunk option
error = TRUE. Similarly, the default handling of warnings
has been set to warning = FALSE so that warnings are
reported on the console rather than in the weaved/knitted
exercises.
Added new argument texengine = "pdflatex" to
exams2pdf() which is passed on to
tinytex::latexmk(..., engine = texengine). Provided that
tinytex support is installed, this option can also be set
to texengine = "xelatex" or "lualatex" for
example.
Added exams2blackboard(..., mathjax = NULL) that
optionally embeds the MathJax <script> in each of the
exercises so that mathematical content can be rendered by MathJax
(rather then by the browser directly). The default is FALSE
unless converter = "pandoc-mathjax" is used. But also for
the default converters (producing MathML output)
mathjax = TRUE can be used. (Suggested and tested by Sean
Quallen and Gabriele Cantaluppi.)
Improvements in exams2blackboard():
<pre> to <code> tags if
fix_pre = TRUE (default) which is necessary in classical
Blackboard systems.expoints.shuffle = TRUE which used to lead
to a missing closing bracket.The auxiliary functions from exams_eval() now
explicitly distinguish between multiple-choice (mchoice)
and single-choice (schoice) exercises provided that the
type of exercise is provided to the functions.
Consequently, schoice questions are now handled like
num or string questions that can just be
correct or wrong (and not like mchoice questions anymore).
Partial credits are only supported for mchoice
questions.
Various improvemens in nops_scan(), especially for
scanning the boxes pertaining to the student registration ID. Rather
than reading a very small area around each box and just shaving off its
borders, a larger area is read now and then shaved iteratively. Hence,
setting it is also easily possible to further increase the
size of the area which may sometimes lead to improved
scanning results.
Improved handling of reglength < 7 in
exams2nops(). Internally, reglength = 7 is
still enforced (and thus necessary in the registration CSV file) but the
initial IDs are fixed to “0” in the exam sheet and corresponding boxes
ticked already.
Improved NOPS language support: Added Czech (cz,
Jindřich Marek) and Galician (gl, Marta Sestelo & Nora
M. Villanueva).
New exercise template
vowels.Rmd/vowels.Rnw contributed by Maria
Paola Bissiri. This is a cloze exercise with
schoice elements that is particularly well-suited for
drop-down menus. It also illustrates how UTF-8 symbols (for Cardinal
vowels) can be used in an exercise.
Improved exams2canvas() (and underlying
exams2qti12()) to assure that the points per
section/exercise are set correctly in the exported QTI code.
Added new argument
exams2moodle(..., forcedownload = FALSE) which when set to
TRUE can force all supplementary links to be downloaded
(rather than opened in the browser). Only supported if
pluginfile = TRUE. If forcedownload = FALSE
the behavior typically depends on the browser, user settings, and file
type.
Improvements in read_exercise():
exshuffle now works for cloze questions
even if no solutionlist is provided. Generally, warnings
have been improved. In particular, it is now checked whether the
question list contains duplicated items for single-choice and
multiple-choice exercises.##ANSWERi## placeholders it is
checked that all necessary placeholders occur exactly once. Otherwise a
warning is issued about missing and/or duplicated placeholders.Bug fix in extract_environment() underlying
read_exercise(): When Markdown tables were formatted with
just --- markup (rather that |---|) some lines
in the table were erroneously forced to lower case (reported by Ulrike
Groemping).
Improvement in extract_command() underlying
read_exercise(): For Sweave exercises leading and trailing
spaces are now also removed (as they always were for Markdown exercises,
pointed out by Ulrich Morawetz).
Interfaces exams2html(), exams2pdf(),
and exams2pandoc() gained an argument
exshuffle = NULL which can be modified to overrule the
exshuffle setting within an exercise (if any). For example,
setting exams2xyz(..., exshuffle = FALSE) retains the full
answerlist without any permutation.
When using pandoc as the converter to
HTML with multiple options, e.g.,
converter = "pandoc-mathml-ascii", then the options were
collapsed to a single string whereas
rmarkdown::pandoc_convert() expects them as a vector (for
checking them). Furthermore, internally, before calling
pandoc_convert(), the default for --wrap is
changed to preserved (rather than auto) and
for --columns to 99999 (rather than
72) in order to assure that tables are processed correctly,
in particular for PDF output.
Improved formatting in exams2pdf() for
cloze exercises with embedded ##ANSWERi##
tags. The formatting of the question in that case is improved and the
question list is not displayed anymore - analogously to
exams2html().
Bug fix for pandoc-based HTML conversion of LaTeX equations
containing \not. These are now converted to
\neq, \nless, \ngtr,
\nleq, \ngeq which are handled by pandoc
correctly. Notably, this affects exercise template
cholesky.Rmd.
The extol metainformation is now processed more
flexibly and reliably in read_metainfo(): First, it is now
enforced to be non-negative. If a negative value is provided by the
exercise, a warning is issued and 0 is used instead. Second, for cloze
exercises the length of extol needs to be either (a) 1 (and
is then recycled for all num elements) or (b) the number of of num
elements (and is then matched correspondingly) or (c) the number of all
cloze elements (and then is assumed to match correspondingly).
Improved the string representation in
metainfo of exercises and corresponding printing in
print.exams_metainfo(). For cloze exercises tolerances of
numeric elements are reported. For single-choice and multiple-choice
exercises lower-case letters (instead of integer indexes) are used to
incide the correct elements (provided that there are not more than 26
elements).
In all mchoice exercise templates provided within
the package it is now assured that there is at least one correct and one
wrong choice item. This is necessary for some learning management
systems like Moodle or Canvas because otherwise they cannot be scored
correctly (specifically when using partial credits). This necessitated
changes in the following exercise templates in the package: anova,
automaton, boxplots, cholesky, relfreq, scatterplot. Consequently, these
templates are not fully backward compatible with their earlier versions.
Further improvements were made in automaton and relfreq.
matrix_to_mchoice() gained a new argument
restricted = FALSE which can be set to TRUE in
order to assure that there is at least one correct and one wrong
solution/comparison in the list of choice items. The option
restricted = TRUE is used in the
cholesky.Rmd/cholesky.Rnw exercise
now.
In exams2pdf() when auto-generating a questionnaire,
the _ is now escaped within the \exstring{}
command.
Added envir argument in exams2qti12()
and exams2qti21() that is passed on to
xweave(). This allows to re-use variables generated in one
exercise in previous exercises, e.g., for creating a sequence of
variables based on the same data set. However, some learning-management
systems do not the drawing of random questions to the same
replication. In that case, this will typically only be useful for exams
with a single random replication. A notable exception are systems based
on QTI 2.1 that can process the output of
exams2qti21(..., selection = "exam") (like
OpenOlat).
In xexams() a new argument rds = FALSE
was added that indicates whether the list returned by the function
should also be saved as an RDS data file. If rds = TRUE the
file name metainfo.rds is used but alternatively
rds can also be specified as a character file name to be
used. The new rds argument is leveraged in
exams2blackboard(), exams2moodle(),
exams2pdf(), exams2html(),
exams2qti12(), and exams2qti21(), as well as
other interfaces built on top of these.
To avoid accidental deletion of files in pre-existing temporary
directories xexams() now assures that the tdir
is not identical to the output directory dir or the
exercise directory edir. Also, the documentation of
tdir in the manual pages has been made even more
explicit.
In {answerlist} definitions for
exams2pdf() and exams2nops() the
enumii counter is used correctly now (rather than
enumi as in previous versions). As all templates provided
in R/exams aimed to set the counter formatting that is used by default
for enumii in LaTeX (namely (a), (b), …) the difference was
never noticed up to now.
Tolerate trailing white spaces in section names for environments like question, solution, answerlist, etc. in R/Markdown exercises.
Bug fix in exams2moodle() which did not process
pluginfile correctly when the supplementary files contained
a + symbol - as produced by expar() temporary
files. The latter now also use _ instead of +
in the file name. (Reported by Nina Timmesfeld.)
In exams2pdf() it is now assured that
name and template are always of the same
length (with a warning if name is too short). (Reported by
JPMD.)
When reading {answerlist} environments in
read_metainfo() now a warning is issued if there is further
text in the same line as the begin or end of the environment. Also
parsing the individual items now also works tab-indented items.
(Reported by Sebastian Kupek.)
Use gfm instead of the depracated
markdown_github to convert to GitHub-flavored Markdown in
exams2arsnova(). As this uses hex encodings for character
entities, the default sep in
make_exercise_transform_pandoc() is changed to a plain
ASCII separator.
Improve handling of duplicated graphics file names in
exams2pdf() (Reported by Eduardo Uresti Charre).
In xweave() the highlight = FALSE
(default) option is now handled by actually setting
highlight = TRUE in combination with lang = ""
for Rmd exercises. The background for this is that recent versions the
LaTeX conversion of pandoc does not yield
{verbatim} environments for text-chunks anymore. Only plain
chunks are converted to {verbatim}.
pandoc availability in
nops_language() examples.New function expar() that helps to fix parameters
(defined in the first code chunk of an exercise). For example
expar("deriv.Rmd", a = 1, c = 0) generates a temporary file
where the parameters a and c of the
deriv.Rmd exercise are fixed to the values 1
and 0, respectively. This can then be processed with
exams2xyz() “as usual”.
Added tinytex::latexmk() as an alternative to
tools::texi2dvi() when converting to PDF output
(exams2nops(), exams2pdf(), …) as suggested by
Yihui Xie. The default is to use tinytex
if(requireNamespace("tinytex")). However, by setting
options(exams_tex = "tools") instead of
exams_tex = "tinytex" the old behavior can be enforced even
if tinytex is installed. When no other LaTeX distribution (like TeXLive
or MikTeX) is installed, yet, tinytex::install_tinytex()
can easily install the TeXLive-based TinyTeX system.
Started enabling setting random seeds for each
individual exercise in an exam, to enable custom exercise selection
(e.g., when only putting together a single exam). Currently, only
supported in xexams(), exams2pdf(),
exams2html(), exams2nops(), and
exams2blackboard().
To make the fixed seeds above applicable to static
exercises where only the exshuffle tag is enabled, the
seed is not only set prior to weaving but also to reading
the exercise.
Improved random shuffling if exshuffle is numeric
where previously the correct solution(s) were not completely randomly
distributed across the possible answers.
In addition to the vector or list specification of the exercise
file in the exams2xyz() interfaces,
file can now also be a matrix. This enables customization
of the exact selection of exercises in each exam. The seed
can be a matrix of the same dimension. Currently, only supported in
xexams(), exams2pdf(),
exams2html(), exams2nops(), and
exams2blackboard().
Improved NOPS language support: Added Korean (ko,
Saewon Jeong), Japanese (ja, Kohei Watanabe), Norwegian
(Bokmal, no, Tormod Boe), Slovenian (sl,
Matjaz Jeran), Vietnamese (vi, Tran Thi Hoang Ha). Some
languages require that markboth/pagestyle are set after
\begin{document} and that a \newpage is
included directly before \end{document}, both of which were
adapted correspondingly.
Improvements in nops_eval(): Show exam ID in HTML
report and round points to four digits. The language= file
paths do not have to be absolute anymore. For interactive
checking/fixing of registration IDs the width of scanned subimage is now
adapted according to the reglength. The default converter
for the HTML report is now "pandoc".
The actual writing of nops_eval() results has been
modularized (with contributions from Kenji Sato). Different
nops_eval_write_<flavor> functions can be plugged in.
At the moment there is only the default writer (optimized for OpenOlat)
but further flavors are planned (including a standalone workflow and one
for Moodle).
Function nops_language() is now exported as part of
the user interface (only internal previously). Based on a language
specification in a DCF file this sets up a list with language texts
(possibly converted to HTML).
New exercise capitals.Rmd/Rnw that
illustrates how a certain number of true/false items can be chosen
randomly from a longer list. The exercise can also be switched from
mchoice to schoice without any further
necessary modifications. Finally, the exercise illustrates that UTF-8
encoding is needed for the Rmd version while in the Rnw version the few
special characters can be coded in ASCII using LaTeX commands.
All LaTeX templates that use \fontfamily{phv} now
also gained a \usepackage{helvet} to ensure that the
corresponding LaTeX packages are installed. When using
tinytex (see above) the corresponding LaTeX packages will
be installed if not yet available upon first usage.
In R/Markdown exercises the question/solution answerlist can now
use not only * but also - as the symbol for
bullet points (suggested by Ben Kasel).
Fixed a bug in exams2pdf() where the case of
multiple duplicated supplement names was not handled correctly (reported
by TwelveFifths on StackOverflow).
Improved xexams() so that full file paths to
exercise files also work on Windows.
read_metainfo() now assures a non-NULL
exname. The default is to use “R/exams exercise”.
Fixed a bug in extract_items() which incorrectly
dropped the last element in an answerlist if it was completely empty
(even without a trailing space). This was a problem for cloze exercises
with ##ANSWER## patterns, leading to a questionlist that was too short
(reported by Julia Guggenberger).
Various fixes and improvements in exams2qti21() (and
thus inherited by exams2openolat()): Support of cloze and
essay type exercises has been much improved, fixing bugs in the XML and
metainformation handling. String exercises work again. The
internally-generated XML labels are more robust now avoiding spaces and
leading integers.
Dependency on R >= 3.4.0 now which enables plugging a custom
svg device into Sweave(). In previous versions of the
package a workaround was included that works for R < 3.4.0 (but
required writing into the global environment which is avoided
now).
pandoc availability. Currently, the rmarkdown
package but not the underlying pandoc support is installed
for the CRAN checks on Solaris and OS X.Added new interface exams2canvas() for the
open-source Canvas learning management system (https://www.instructure.com/canvas). This is essentially
a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12() along with a few
Canvas-specific modifications of the QTI XML specification. The function
has only received limited testing so far and is likely to improve in
future version. The supported exercise types are num, schoice, mchoice,
and string (but not cloze, yet).
The default in exams2moodle() has been changed to
converter = "pandoc-mathjax". Thus, instead of relying on
the browser to render mathematical notation from MathML, the MathJax
plugin is now assumed to be enabled on the Moodle server (which is the
default when setting up a new Moodle server). To employ MathML one can
use converter = NULL or
converter = "pandoc-mathml" etc. See the discussion at https://www.R-exams.org/tutorials/math/ for more
details.
exams_skeleton() has been updated. The new default
is markup = "markdown" as this appears to be the more
common choice for newcomers to R/exams. Furthermore, the list of
exercises in the demo-*.R scripts has been updated to use
newer exercises as well (along with links to the web page: https://www.R-exams.org/templates/).
Assure in nops_scan() that scanned image file names
contain no spaces.
Fixed bugs in exams2qti21() (and hence
exams2openolat()) for certain combinations of
maxchars specifications in string
exercises.
Added \usepackage[...]{babel} support to
language specification of exams2nops(). In
addition to a new Babel: ... field, the DCF file can also
provide a Header: ... field, e.g., for changing the font
encoding or adding further options.
For convenience, when
exams2html(..., converter = "pandoc-mathjax"),
mathjax = TRUE is added automatically (unless explicitly
switched off).
Added envir argument in exams2moodle()
that is passed on to xweave().
The print() method for exams_metainfo
objects received a new block argument so that
print(exams_metainfo(x), which = 1, block = 5) prints the
metainformation (type/solution) of the first exam in the object
x (output from any exams2xyz() function) in
blocks of 5 exercises.
For exams2openolat() the handling of the internal
pandoc fixups was extended to replace
align="right" in tables with
style="text-align: right;" (and analogously for
"left" and "center").
In nops_eval() duplicated sheets (original and
replacement) were sometimes omitted even if the student ID was just
000000 (i.e., not read correctly by
nops_scan()). A check has been added that avoids
this.
Changed the default of fix_choice in
exams2arsnova(). Current versions of the official ARSnova
server (https://arsnova.eu/) have the LaTeX rendering in the
choice options switched off. Hence, by setting
fix_choice = TRUE by default the LaTeX math markup is
removed.
Add \setkeys{Gin}{keepaspectratio} in the default
exams2pdf() template for pandoc
(plain8.tex) and in exams2nops(). This is
necessitated by a change in pandoc that now always sets
height=\textheight when width= is specified
(see https://pandoc.org/faqs.html).
nops_scan() gained a new argument
trim = 0.3 that controls how much of check boxes is trimmed
in order to shave the borders prior to determining the average gray
level. In versions up to 2.3-1 this implicitly had a value of
0.25 hard-coded. Now the default was increased to
0.3 in order to shave box borders more reliably.
nops_scan() tries to process registration numbers
more reliably. In case one of the registration columns contains more
than one potential mark, the heuristics of determining the intended mark
have been improved.
New exercise confint3.Rmd/Rnw that
illustrates how to use the "verbatim"
clozetype for Moodle. The exercises yields 100% of the
points for the correct solution based on t quantiles but still 50% for a
partially correct solution based on normal quantiles (contributed by
Ulrike Groemping).
nops_eval() gained a new argument
labels = NULL that can be used to give labels for the marks
that differ from the default (length(mark) + 1):1.
In all LaTeX templates that use Helvetica (phv) as the font for
the main text, this is also used now in math mode by
\usepackage[helvet]{sfmath} (rather than
\usepackage{sfmath}, as employed previously). In
particular, this also affects exams2nops() and
tex2image() output.
In exams2nops() the header argument can
also be specified simply as header = "\\mycommand{value}"
rather than header = list(mycommand = "value"). The former
is more flexible, e.g., for passing additional options or more complex
commands. Internally, the former is turned into an unnamed list which is
then processed correspondingly by exams2pdf().
Various bug fixes in exams2qti21() pertaining to
points and correct/incorrect computations for schoice/mchoice
exercises.
New language support in exams2nops: Russian (ru,
contributed by Boris Demeshev) and Serbian (sr, contributed
by Tatjana Kecojevic). Croatian (hr) was streamlined along
with Serbian (by Tatjana Kecojevic).
In include_supplement() an argument
target = NULL was added to optionally include the
supplement with a different file name than the original file
name.
Bug fix in the pandoc interface which previously
erroneously produced unbalanced
tags in certain situations.
Rather than fully importing the basic dependencies
stats, graphics, grDevices,
tools, and utils, the required functions are
imported selectively only. (Issue raised by Florian Oswald.)
Added new interface exams2openolat() for the
open-source OpenOlat learning management system (https://www.openolat.com/). This is only a convenience
wrapper to exams2qti12() or exams2qti21() with
some dedicated tweaks for optimizing MathJax output for
OpenOlat.
When using exams2html(..., mathjax = TRUE) for
testing purposes, mathjax.rstudio.com is used now rather than
cdn.mathjax.org which is currently redirecting and will eventually be
shut down completely.
Bug fixes and improvements in HTML transformers:
="file.ext" (with =") is replaced now
by Base 64 version.href="file.ext" is replaced by
href="file.ext" download="file.ext" prior to Base 64
replacement.alt="file.ext" and download="file.ext" are
preserved without Base 64 encoding.In exams2html() and other interfaces based on
make_exercise_transform_html() base64 = TRUE
now uses Base 64 encoding for all file extensions (known to the package)
whereas base64 = NULL only encodes image files (previous
default behavior).
After setting a random seed exams2nops() and
exams2pdf() now yield the same random versions of the
exercises. Previously, this was not the case because
exams2nops() internally generates a single random trial
exam first for a couple of sanity checks. Now, the
.GlobalEnv$.Random.seed is restored after generating the
trial exam.
Fixed the support for nsamp argument in
exams2nops(). Furthermore, current limitations of
exams2nops() are pointed out more clearly and error
messages and edge cases caught.
Include further file URIs for Base 64 supplements, in particular .sav for SPSS data files.
New language support in exams2nops(): Croatian
(hr, contributed by Krunoslav Juraic), Danish
(da, contributed by Tue Vissing Jensen & Jakob
Messner), Slovak (sk, contributed by Peter Fabsic), Swiss
German (gsw, contributed by Reto Stauffer), Turkish
(tr, contributed by Emrah Er). Furthermore, Portuguese has
been distinguished into pt-PT (Portuguese Portuguese)
vs. pt-BR (Brazilian Portuguese) with pt
defaulting to the former (contributed by Thomas Dellinger).
include_supplement(..., dir = "foo") now also works
if "foo" is sub-directory to the exercise directory
(edir).
Allow varying points within a certain exercise in
nops_eval().
exams2blackboard(..., base64 = FALSE, ...) was
erroneously ignored. No matter how base64 was specified essentially
base64 = TRUE was used, it is honored again now.
Fixed a bug in stresstest_exercise() where the
“rank” (previously called “order”) of the correct solution was computed
incorrectly. Enhancement in plots and labels.
Fixed a bug for tex2image(..., tikz = TRUE) where
erroneously \usetikzlibrary{TRUE} was included. Also
tex2image(..., Sweave = TRUE) (the default) did not run
properly on Windows, fixed now.
New function include_tikz() that facilitates
compiling standalone tikz figures and including it in an exercise
(especially for non-LaTeX-based output).
Added support for \tightlist (as produced by
pandoc) in all current LaTeX templates as well as
exams2nops().
\exshuffle{<num>} can now also be used for
schoice exercises with more than one true answer. In a first step only
one of the true answers is selected and then <num>-1
items from the false answers.
Better warnings if \exshuffle{<num>} could not
be honored due to a lack of sufficiently many (suitable) answer
alternatives.
Enable passing of envir argument from
exams2html() to xweave() in case of Rmd
exercises.
Bug fix in CSV export of exams2arsnova(). Recent
ARSnova versions use “mc” (rather than “MC”) and “abcd” (rather than
“SC”) for multiple-choice and single-choice questions,
respectively.
A new web page accompanying the package is now available at https://www.R-exams.org/. This already contains a first overview of the package, some tutorials, and a gallery of all exercise templates provided in the package. More tutorials will follow in the form of blog articles.
A few exercise templates were slightly changed or improved for the new web page. Hence slightly different formulations or formatting may be used in some places.
tex2image() has been rewritten to use the LaTeX
class {standalone} instead of manually handling boxes and cropping of
the PDF output. For converting to raster graphics like PNG (the
default), R package magick is now used rather than
system("convert ...") calls to ImageMagick on the system.
For conversion to SVG it is still necessary to call pdfcrop
and pdf2svg on via system().
More fixups in LaTeX code prior to processing with
pandoc_convert(), especially \url{...} is
replaced by \href{...}{\texttt{...}} now to ensure
typesetting in typewriter font.
When including R input code chunks in Rmd exercises, code
decoration is switched off by default now (knitr option
highlight = FALSE) so that the output can be combined with
standard LaTeX templates. The default can be changed either in the
individual Rmd code chunks, e.g., {r, highlight=TRUE}, or by setting
highlight = TRUE in the call to xweave(). For
the latter case a new LaTeX template plain-highlight.tex is
also provided, e.g., to be used via:
exams2pdf("lm.Rmd", highlight = TRUE, template = "plain-highlight")
exams2pdf() gained an argument
texdir = NULL. By default a temporary directory is created
for running LaTeX (and cleaned up subsequently). But using
texdir = "/path/to/dir" an output directory can be
specified so that the LaTeX files can be inspected, e.g., for
debugging.
In exams2pdf() the control argument was
extended to encompass a new cloze.collapse option to fine
tune the display of mchoice/schoice alternatives within a cloze
subexercise. By default the separator is " / " for
collapsing the choice alternatives. Alternatively, for example, it could
be set to "\\\\" to add line breaks between the
alternatives. Finally,
control = list(cloze.collapse = "enumerate") uses a nested
enumerate environment.
nops_scan() now uses the dir argument
not only for the output ZIP file but also for the input PDF/PNG image
files.
exams2pdf() and hence also exams2nops()
now try to iconv() the header information to the specified
encoding (if any) rather than relying on header information
(such as institution name etc.) are specified in LaTeX.
Added new interface exams2pandoc() which can
generate a wide variety of output formats via pandoc. The
main purpose is to generate Docx output files (or ODT). The output
format can be controlled through a template in either LaTeX, HTML, or
Markdown format.
New function stresstest_exercise() for “stress
testing” of exercises, i.e., rerunning the exercise many times and
capturing how the outcome depends on the simulated input
parameters.
New (and still somewhat experimental) function
match_exams_call() that can be employed to query which
exams2xyz() function was called to create a certain
exercise/exam. Only works from R 3.2.0 onwards.
Bug fix in read_exercise() for the case when
exshuffle is integer. This was not correctly reflected in
metainfo$length.
Avoid
formatting in questionlist/solutionlist when using
converter = "pandoc" in the conversion to HTML.
Formatting of exercises without “solution” section improved in
exams2html() and exams2moodle().
In exams2qti12() the case of no answer was not
handled correctly if partial = FALSE, negative = ... was
used. No answer was handled as incorrect (= negative points) rather than
neutral (= zero points) but has been fixed now.
Added first release version of exams2blackboard().
This is essentially based on exams2qti12() but incorporates
Blackboard’s own flavor of QTI 1.2. It is still likely to change due to
improvements in future versions. After uploading a test into Blackboard
the material will appear under “Course Tools”: The test will be
available in “Tests” and each pool within the test will also appear in
“Pools”.
Added a new convenience function
include_supplement() which facilitates including static
supplement files (e.g., graphics or datasets). This essentially just
calls file.copy() but facilitates finding supplement files
that are available along with the Rnw/Rmd exercise files.
xweave() gained an extra argument
svg = FALSE to optionally produce scalable vector graphics
(SVG) instead of PNG for later rendering into HTML. All HTML-based
exams2xyz() functions gained an svg = FALSE
argument that can be set to TRUE to produce SVG instead of
PNG. Base64 encoding is also used for SVG graphics by default.
xweave() gained an argument
engine = NULL that can optionally be set to
engine = "knitr" to enable processing Rnw exercises by
knitr::knit() instead of the default
utils::Sweave().
exams2nops() now supports registration IDs with more
than 7 digits. Up to now, 7 digits were hard-coded but now values of 8,
9, or 10 are also possible by setting the argument
reglength in exams2nops()
accordingly.
In exams2nops() the argument blank can
now be a vector of length 2 with the number of blank pages before and
after the extra “pages”.
Added arguments samepage = FALSE and
twocolumn = FALSE in exams2nops(). If set to
TRUE, samepage adds a {samepage} environment around the
question and solution lists in order to prevent page breaks within these
lists. And the twocolumn option, if set to TRUE, is added
in the \documentclass so that the exam is displayed in
two-column format.
New language support in exams2nops(): Hungarian
(hu, contributed by Gergely Daroczi and Denes Toth),
Finnish (fi, contributed by Klaus Nordhausen). Improvements
in: Portugese (pt, contributed by Mauricio
Calvao).
Improvements and bug fixes in exams2tcexam().
Various HTML tags are now supported in the development version by adding
a new [html] tag in TCExam. This has been integrated into UIBK’s version
of TCExam but is not in the official release yet.
Fixed a bug in exams2html() with option
solution = FALSE or question = FALSE. Now
these correctly suppress the corresponding element of the exercise. In
previous versions only the header had been set to NA
erroneously.
exams2moodle() can now optionally turn “string”
exercises in “essay” quiz items rather than the default “shortanswer”.
Various customization options can be set the exextra
metainformation. The most important options are illustrated in the new
“essayreg” exercise.
\exshuffle{} can now also be used in
read_exercise() for subsampling rather than permutations
only, e.g., via . This first permutes the alternatives, always uses the
first permuted true (if any), the first permuted false (if any), and
then the first remaining alternatives. This facilitates static
schoice/mchoice exercises which have many alternatives but should only
use a limited number (say 5 for exams2nops()) in each
random replication.
Bug fix in extract_extra() which prevented
exextra metainformation from being read correctly in the
previous version.
Improvement in xexams() to better support using the
same exercise template several times within the same exam (e.g., for
generating a single PDF with multiple versions of the same exercise).
The temporary file names employed are now run through
make.unique() first.
Improvement in exams2pdf() to assure that
duplication in file names for graphics (across exercises within the same
exam) are handled correctly.
Within several exams2xyz() functions
gsub(...) calls were changed to
gsub(..., fixed = TRUE) for replacing placeholders that
potentially have slashes.
Updated exams2arsnova() to assure that
\( ... \) instead of $ ... $ is used for
inline math. Also the JSON output was augmented with (almost empty)
“publicPool” information to keep current ARSnova versions
happy.
New exercises “deriv”/“deriv2” (both in Rnw and Rmd) that illustrate a simple question about derivatives to be solved by the product rule. The “deriv” exercise is in num format and “deriv2” is the same in schoice (suggested by Martin Obradovits).
The tth/ttm-based HTML conversion now
makes sure that empty question/solution/list elements remain empty and
do not introduce line breaks.
Added copies of num_to_schoice(),
num_to_tol(), … called num2schoice(), and
num2tol(), …
Exercises can now either be in Rnw format (R/LaTeX, as in
previous versions) or in Rmd format (R/Markdown). A new function
xweave() is provided for weaving either format by either
calling utils::Sweave() for Rnw and
knitr::knit() for Rmd. If Rmd exercises are used, the
weaved exercises require conversion by pandoc (see
below).
The vignettes have not yet been updated to incorporate the
R/Markdown information or the new interfaces described below. For
examples and some introductory comments, exams_skeleton()
can generate demo scripts.
Added new make_exercise_transform_pandoc()
transfomer generator, interfacing
rmarkdown::pandoc_convert(). This provides an additional
option for generating HTML output and additionally enables Markdown
output (e.g., for ARSnova, see below).
Added new interface exams2nops() for generating PDF
exams that can be printed, scanned, and automatically evaluated.
Accompanying functions nops_scan() (using the
png package) and nops_eval() are provided as
well. The “nops” exams can be internationalized. So far there is
language support for English (en), Dutch (nl,
contributed by Niels Smits), French (fr, contributed by
Arthur Allignol), German (de), Italian (it,
contributed by Domenico Zambella), Portuguese (pt,
contributed by Fabian Petutschnig), Romanian (ro,
contributed by Cristian Gatu), Spanish (es, contributed by
Maria Kogelnik).
Added new interface exams2arsnova() for exporting
exams/quizzes to the interactive audience response system ARSnova (https://arsnova.eu/). This
can either create JSON output files (via RJSONIO::toJSON)
that need to be manually imported into ARSnova - or the JSON string can
directly be imported into an active ARSnova session (via
RCurl).
Added abstention option in schoice/mchoice questions
in exams2moodle(). This can also be set directly through an
\exabstention{} tag in the corresponding Rnw
exercise.
Added various convenience functions for creating single- or
multiple-choice questions from either a single numeric result
(num_to_schoice) or from a matrix solution
(matrix_to_schoice, matrix_to_mchoice,
det_to_schoice).
Added various convenience functions for formatting numbers within
exercises: fmt() for conveniently displaying a certain
number of digits, round2() for rounding away from zero,
char_with_braces() for adding braces to negative numbers,
and a toLatex() method for "matrix"
objects.
tex2image() now also supports
format = "svg" via pdfcrop followed by
pdf2svg (instead of ImageMagick’s
convert).
Fixed bug in file paths created for “media” supplements in QTI XML formats. File names had an unnecessary trailing slash which lead to unrecognized suffixes in some browsers.
Added an optional transform = NULL argument in
exams2pdf().
Avoid require(...) calls for suggested
packages.
The default encoding in exams2moodle() is now
ensured to be "UTF-8" rather than "utf8" for
improved cross-platform compatibility.
\exshuffle{TRUE} is now also used in
read_exercise() so that schoice/mchoice exercises (or
schoice/mchoice components in cloze exercises) are shuffled upon reading
exercises. This facilitates static schoice/mchoice exercises.
New cloze type “verbatim” which is not processed further (e.g., to include Moodle control structures).
Empty questionlists for readily prepared Moodle cloze exercises
can now be handled in exams2pdf().
Functions from non-imported packages (e.g., only suggested) are now always called with package::function to make R-devel checks happy.
Bug fix in processing of duration in
exams2qti12().
New version accompanying publication of exams version 2 in the
Journal of Statistical Software, 58(1), 1-36.
See vignette("exams2", package = "exams") for more
details.
License extended from GPL-2 to GPL-2 | GPL-3.
New exams2qti21() interface for generating QTI 2.1
(rather than QTI 1.2) XML. So far this was only tested with the ONYX
Player within OpenOLAT. Currently, some switches do not appear to fully
work, yet, at least within ONYX. The function still needs further
thorough testing and might be further improved in future
versions.
Added verbose = FALSE option to
xexams() and exams2xyz() interfaces. If set to
TRUE, progress information on the exam generation is
printed.
The XML output in exams2qti12() sometimes did not
yield fully correct QTI 1.2 output. This has been fixed now and test
output was validated against the QTI 1.2 DTD.
Added a new pluginfile = TRUE option in
exams2moodle(). By default, supplementary files (graphics,
data files, etc.) are now included using Moodle’s Pluginfile mechanism.
This may not work with older versions of Moodle (< 2.5) but in newer
versions it is better and more robust than using data URIs.
Added fix_num = TRUE option in
exams2qti12() interface. Because OLAT does not display the
correct answer of response_num items with tolerances (vargt/varlt), a
workaround was added: In addition to the version with tolerances an
exact equality is checked (varequal), adding and removing a 0.00001
points. Thus, evaluation of the exams is not affected but the display in
OLAT is fixed.
The {answerlist} in the {solution} environment can now also be
omitted (in mchoice, schoice, cloze exercises). It is still recommended
to include it but all exams2xyz() interfaces can process
exercises correctly that do not provide it.
tests/encodings.R to use
encoding = "Latin-9" (rather than "latin9"
which does not work on Solaris, see ?iconv).The new function exams_skeleton() helps users to
create their first exam. It creates a directory with a
demo.R script illustrating the use of the various
exams2xyz() interfaces. Subdirectories with copies of all
demonstration exercise Rnw files and templates for different output
formats (LaTeX, HTML, or XML) are also created.
Encodings are now explicitly supported by all
exams2xyz() interfaces. Essentially, the encoding argument
is just passed on to Sweave() and the user has to make sure
that the template (for LaTeX, HTML, or XML output) has the appropriate
encoding. exams_skeleton() also supports this and
especially the encoding UTF-8 is now fully integrated. The encodings
ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) or ISO-8859-15 (aka latin9) have also been
tested while other encodings may need further touch-ups. Furthermore,
the developers recommend to not rely on encodings but to code
special characters with their LaTeX commands because these work in all
locales on all platforms.
The new function exams_eval() captures various types
of evaluation policies for exams (with/without partial credits for
multiple choice, with/without negative points). The resulting functions
aid generation of e-learning exams or evaluation of an exam “by
hand”.
If the edir argument is specified in
exams2xyz(), then all files in edir and its
subdirectories are searched recursively.
Asymmetric tolerance intervals are not supported in the
exams2xyz() interfaces anymore. Instead, vectors of
solutions in cloze exercises can have vectors of tolerances.
The original exam.tex/solution.tex
templates have been renamed to
oexam.tex/osolution.tex. The function
exams() needs to be used with oexam/osolution while
exam/solution are now optimized for exams2pdf(). The reason
is that the questionnaire command has been changed. For a
multiple-choice question with five answers and correct solutions 1 and
4, say, exams() produces while exams2pdf() now
uses [ ][ ][X][ ], i.e., with optional instead of required arguments.
The latter solution is not restricted to multiple-choice questions with
exactly five answers anymore.
find.package() rather than
.find.package() internally (as the latter will be
deprecated soon).exams2pdf(). The lack of .tex suffixes led to errors on
certain Windows systems.confint2.Rnw shows how a confidence interval can be
embedded into a cloze question (for all version 2 interfaces).dist.Rnw is a very short and simple example that is
intelligible across a wide range of disciplines (not for statistics
audiences only).dist2.Rnw is an extension of dist.Rnw that
is written as a cloze.exams2moodle() were forced to be
-formatted, now embedded in normal HTML (withouttags).
Supplementary files had not been correctly inferred on Solaris systems. This has been fixed now so that the package behaves the same across different platforms.
The code underlying the old "exams" vignette now
avoids opening PDF viewers.
exams package, adding flexible
support for generation of exams in different formats including PDF,
HTML, Moodle XML, and QTI 1.2 (for OLAT). This new version of the exams
package (called “version 2”) is described in a new vignette:
vignette("exams2", package = "exams")Added an {answerlist} environment in the LaTeX templates
(inst/tex) so that each
in the {answerlist} is automatically labeled with (a), (b), (c), …
Replaced the old {itemize} environments with {answerlist} in
anova.Rnw, boxplots.Rnw,
relfreq.Rnw, scatterplot.Rnw,
ttest.Rnw. (The resulting PDFs do not change.)
nsamp was added to exams() in
order to allow sampling more than one exercise from each element of the
argument file.The man page of exams() was modified to use suitable
markup commands.
The questions in the ANOVA example were slightly changed to more explicitly indicate which hypothesis is tested. A typo in the vignette was fixed.
New version accompanying publication in the Journal of
Statistical Software. See
vignette("exams", package = "exams") for more
details.
New CITATION file pointing to the JSS paper, see
citation("exams").
The possible types of questions were extended to allow also text results. The new type is specified by “string”.
To specify the allowed tolerance for numeric solutions now
different tolerances can be supplied for falling below or exceeding the
true value via \extol{lower}{upper}.
The “discussion” section in the vignette was extended to include several remarks and pointers on strategies for exercise generation.
First CRAN release version.
New vignette("exams", package = "exams") that
explains how to use the package.
New set of exercises for illustation in examples and vignette.
These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.