YouTestMe - GetCertified

Features

General Information

The features contained in YouTestMe – GetCertified are tailored to meet the major demands that testing facilities, educational institutions and businesses may encounter.

Personal Profile

Each user has a profile page containing personal details, their role and the test collection. User passwords may be changed through this window manually, or generated by the system and sent by email.

Profiles

This part of the application contains several modules. The first and perhaps most important is a table that contains all users in the system. This table’s columns can be filtered, ordered and searched for easier manipulation and organization.
The second thing is the role system – each user is granted a role that defines their access to certain parts of the application. Those users that have a higher level of permissions can create new roles and assign them to users. Excel spreadsheets can also be used to import users into the application. Through this part of the application, people with higher level permissions can handle the register requests for new users.

User Groups

The users in the application can be organized into groups, if necessary. This feature was introduced with the goal to enable test managers to assign tests faster than before, without the need to select each individual separately.

Questions

The objects that contain questions are called Question Pools. They can hold a theoretically infinite number of questions. Access to the Pools is entirely personal, but the creator(s) can make it publicly available. Every user can make their personal Question Pools. The pool creator(s) can select which members can use the pool. It is also possible to import questions into pools by using the application’s Excel template. The questions in the application are sorted by difficulty: Easy, Medium and Hard. Besides this, questions can be differentiated according to their type:
1. Single choice – Test participants can choose one of the offered answers and only one is correct.
2. Multiple choice – More than one of the offered answers may be correct.
3. Ordering – Place the offered answers into correct order.
4. Matching – The participants need to match the answers from the left side to the ones on the right.
5. True or False – The participants need to review if the given statement is true or false.
6. Fill in the blanks – Blank spaces are left for participants to enter their answers in. Usually involves completing sentences.
7. Essay – Requires the user to type in a free form of text on the given theme.
First five question types can be graded automatically, while the last two require a test manager to grade them. Also, by using the built-in question editor it is possible to customize questions in various ways. For example, essay questions can be used to present mathematical functions and expressions or pictures and HTML content. The main goal of the editor is to support creativity.

Test

Within the application, there is an implemented Test Generator whose main purpose is to drastically reduce the amount of time spent creating tests and evaluating. It is very simple to use, since it is only needed to enter certain test parameters, assign to members and choose a grading system. Here are the parameters that need to be entered:
1. Test name
2. Test type
3. Access
4. Test duration type and duration (if the test is timed)
5. Report type and content
6. Test look type
Optionally, a test description can be entered and the option to randomize the question and answer order.
After typing in these parameters, the creator proceeds to the next step where they need to enter question pool resources for that test, set the test availability, optionally define the frequency factor and set a cut-off date. The only pools that can be chosen are those where the test creator is a member. Entering individual questions is also possible and this way test managers can add questions to both the test and a pool. Test availability represents the time period that the test will be available for taking. Frequency factor is an optional feature that represents several frequency attributes that can be attached to each question: Never, Rarely, Medium, Often and Always. Each of these attributes represents a percentage of how likely is the question to appear in the test. Another optional feature is a cut-off date. This feature serves to avoid the repetition of questions in consecutive tests. After setting all these parameters, they can be reviewed in a table.
The next step involves setting the number of test versions. A test version represents a set of questions created according to the parameters defined in the previous step. Basically, if the resource is big enough, every test participant might receive a different test version, which eliminates potential cheating and copying answers.
Besides entering the number of test versions, this step involves setting the number of points awarded for correct answers and penalty for wrong answers according to question difficulty (easy, medium and hard). Once the values have been set, the table will show the maximum number of points that may be earned in the test, the number of questions of each difficulty and the total number of questions.