[Edu-sig] Python Programming: Procedural Online Test

[damon bryant]

Thanks, Wesley!

If the item bank were larger, you would not have received easier questions 
at the end. You would have gotten more difficult questions. The bank for the 
demo is quite small, so you exhausted all of the difficult ones first 
because your ability initially mapped on to the difficult portion of the 
scale. The algorithm is quite efficient in determining where you are on the 
scale after about 3 - 5 questions.  In a test with a larger bank, you would 
have received more difficult questions as long as you kept getting them 
right. The test would finally terminate after 20 questions being 
administered. The alpha of the test, a psychometric term for reliability, is 
estimated to be .92 or higher with this number of items in a well designed 
computer adaptive test.

I have corrected the issue with the use of 'sum' (now ‘sum1’) and the syntax 
error with 'True:' (now ‘True’); that was a good catch! On a different note, 
I thought by designing this trial version of the system in Python, there 
would be an increase in the time in serving the questions to the client. I 
guess that using numarray and multithreading to do the heavy lifting on the 
back end has made it ‘fast enough’ for operational use. What do you think?



>From: w chun <wescpy at gmail.com>
>To: damon bryant <damonbryant at msn.com>
>CC: edu-sig at python.org
>Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Python Programming: Procedural Online Test
>Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 23:46:32 -0800
>
> > The problems seemed to get much easier in the last 5 or so (very basic
> > syntax questions).  The one about "James"=="james" returning -1 is no 
>longer
> > true on some Pythons (as now we have boolean True).
>
>
>the tests were well done... i enjoyed taking them.  like kirby, i also
>found the Boolean issue.  in the procedural test, i found a syntax
>error... i think the question with the [None] * 5... (well, [None,
>None, None, None, None] actually), where you're setting "x[b[i] =
>True:" ... that colon shouldn't be there.  there was/were also
>question(s) which used sum as a variable name.  that is a built-in
>function that is hidden if used.  interestingly enough, your syntax
>checked actually highlighted it too.  :-)
>
>cheers,
>-- wesley
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>"Core Python Programming", Prentice Hall, (c)2006,2001
>     http://corepython.com
>
>wesley.j.chun :: wescpy-at-gmail.com
>cyberweb.consulting : silicon valley, ca
>http://cyberwebconsulting.com