Support for writing exams

[AmeliaMN]

There was some discussion about this over dinner, particularly with @kmaurer about the need for better tooling to support writing exams. It sounds like Karsten already generates random numbers to make questions change from version to version (I want to learn more about this!) but there are other features that would be good:

• RMarkdown support for nested numbered items, as in \begin{enumerate} from LaTeX (@yihui, any thoughts?)
• the ability to mark a multiple choice question so the answers (\item{}s) will be reordered
• the ability to mark a section of questions so the questions will be reordered (e.g., my first ten questions are multiple choice, and those can go in any order)
• overall parameterization so you could change one flag and knit a random exam from the document and have everything happen together (not changing parameters in many places)
• of course, support for set.seed() so the exam is reproducible

It would also be great to be able to pull from a bank of questions, as in "pick one of questions n through p." I've done something nearing this for homework, using a .bib file as a sort of database and a LaTeX package (maybe this one?), but it doesn't play nicely with code chunks.

[AmeliaMN]

Ooh, thought of another feature I'd like. A way to automatically generate a coverpage that includes the total points, by setting the points for each question and having the document count up the points. Right now I do it by hand and often miss something as I'm iteratively editing the document.

[iqis]

Looks like the R ecosystem will get much harder to escape in the future...

[AmeliaMN]

and ANOTHER thing (can you tell I'm writing an exam tonight?)-- code folding of questions

[yihui]

• RMarkdown support for nested numbered items, as in \begin{enumerate} from LaTeX (@yihui, any thoughts?)

I'm not sure what this means, but you can nest anything in lists by indenting by a number of spaces: http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#block-content-in-list-items

[kmaurer]

It seems like this would have parallels to general report writing with knitr or markdown, but specific tools for automating common exam writing tasks (generating multiple unique versions to aid academic integrity, randomizing question ordering, creating coverpages, etc) could be valuable for the academic community. I'm excited about the idea!

[AmeliaMN]

Via Luke Tierney, I think this is just the solution I've been looking for!! http://www.r-exams.org/ cc @kmaurer and @vfquirin.

[yihui]

Oh I thought you knew the exams package. It has been on CRAN for a decade, although it started with LaTeX in the beginning. I was just not quite sure how well it supports R Markdown, so I didn't mention it. (Actually last month I just had a brief interaction with Achim on SO regarding a LaTeX issue.)

[ellisvalentiner]

This is interesting. I don’t know most of the packages on CRAN even if they have been there for a long time. In fact, CRAN is usual the last pace I look for a package.

On Apr 15, 2019, at 10:56 PM, Yihui Xie notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh I thought you knew the exams package. It has been on CRAN for a decade, although it started with LaTeX in the beginning. I was just not quite sure how well it supports R Markdown, so I didn't mention it. (Actually last month I just had a brief interaction with Achim on SO regarding a LaTeX issue.)

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