Explore the Question Pools features and how to set up an assignment to use Question Pools.
Question Pools allow you to create an assignment that randomly selects Questions to display to each student. You can specify the number of Questions to sample from and set specific sampling requirements, or you can choose to have a random number of Questions displayed to the student.
In the Settings for an Atomic Assessment, select the Random Question Selection section to see the Question Pooling settings.
Figure 1: Setting Up Question Pools
Random selection
The random selection option is available in any assignment. You can specify a number under the Number of Questions to randomly select field and the assignment will randomly pull n Questions out of the total number of available Questions in the assignment. The assignment will be randomized to each student.
Sample based on tags
Sampling based on tags is only available for Questions that have tags in an assignment. This option can be used to create an assessment where students are tested on several topics but you want them to see a varied amount of questions for each topic.
Example Use Case:
Figure 2: Example Sampling Based on Tags
Each Question in this assignment has two tags: a topic and a difficulty level. Sampling can be chosen using either category, but this example shows questions sampled by topics.
This assignment will show each student 10 questions, 3 from Algebraic Concepts, 2 from Data Analysis/Probability/Statistics, 2 from Measurement/Geometry, and 3 from Numbers and Operations on Numbers.
The Easy, Medium, and Hard tags will be ignored when choosing questions to show students. If there are any questions that have an Easy, Medium, or Hard tag but no topic tag, they would be included in the assignment.
How to configure the assignment
- Create all of the material you want to test on and add those to your assignment. The assignment will act as your Question pool, so add all of the Question to the assignment that you want to test on.
- Add tags to your Questions based on the specific groupings you want to sample for. If you don't have tags created and added already, you can learn how to create and apply tags here.
- Once you have applied tags to the related Questions, go to the Assignment Settings, scroll down to the Question Pool section, and check the box Sample based on tags.
- All of the tags in your assignment will display so that you can set sampling requirements, including:
- Don’t include Questions with this tag: Questions will not be included in the assignment
- 1+: A random selection of the specified number of Questions will be included in the assignment
- Don’t sample based on this tag: Questions will not be sampled. Instead, all Questions with this tag will be included in the assignment.
Note: Don’t sample based on this tag will include all Questions with the tag unless you have other tags attached to the Question that are excluded in other ways. For example, I have a Question tagged with both Tag 1 and Tag 2. I set my Tag 1 settings to randomly select 1 and my Tag 2 settings to 'don't sample'. The student may not see the Question because of the Tag 1 setting.