Types of Questions

Sorry for the silence over the summer. But the work went a bit quiet then. What we have done recently is to add the WSDL end points for the SOAP part of our service and attemted to test in anger the service.

A number of points we found

1. We had to correct an oversight. Any attribute in xml cannot have a quotation mark in it (because the quotation mark is the delimiter of an attribute). This was causing problems with questions created with quotation marks. Therefore we are just bug fixing that.
2. Also, we can't have questions with hash symbols in them either. If they appear in generated qml, QuestionMark refuses to import them.
3. A third question is what variant of QML (by Questionmark) should we support. For now, we are working on supporting the importation of non graphical questions form QML in Perception 3 and Perception 4 - but only exporting to Perception 4's flavour of QML. This latter point has given us some problems with a question of this type:
   ---ORDER---
   Associate the following numbers with their type:
   1@Odd
   2@Even
   3@Odd
   If we export this as a QML "SEL" question, there is no problem - the three numbers appear with dropdown boxes beside each one allowing the student to choose "odd" or "even". However, the SEL is depracated in Perception 4 where a "MATCH" style question is used instead. However, in that "odd" appears twice in the drop down list -and more problematically - in runtime mode - you aren't allowed to choose an item you have chosen previously. Making this kind of question very difficult. However, an easy work around is to switch the question to type "MAT" (or Matrix) - where it will again become possible to make multiple associations of the same term.

All of which shows that translating questions is much like translating languages. There are often 1-1 correspondences which are easy. But also there are occaisions where you need to arrive at the essence of what is being said and then recast it in the terms of the other language. The English "the straw that broke the camel's back" - in Italian becomes "La goccia che fa traboccare il vaso d'aqua" literally - the drop that made the vase of water topple over.