exams 2.4-3

• New convenience functions for keeping track of all elements within an exercise (especially in cloze exercises): add_cloze() and format_metainfo(). These are particularly helpful for creating relatively simple exercises or tutorials where the elements are fixed or computed from a given data set etc. See help("add_cloze", package = "exams") for documentation and the new penguins.Rmd (or penguins.Rnw) exercise for a worked example.

• Added first release version of new interface exams2ans() for the Dutch testing platform Ans. It is essentially a wrapper to exams2qti21() along with a few Ans-specific modifications of the QTI XML specification. The function has only received limited testing so far and is likely to improve in future versions. All five item types are supported but cloze questions can only consist of num and string combinations or mchoice and schoice combinations. The work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch National Growth Fund Programme Npuls (Regulation ‘IO: 112026’).

• Added first release version of new interface exams2wooclap() for Wooclap, a digital voting system for creating interaction during teaching moments. It is essentially a wrapper to exams2moodle() along with a few Wooclap-specific tweaks. The function has only received limited testing so far and is likely to improve in future versions. The supported exercise types are num, schoice, mchoice, and string (but only limited support for cloze questions). The work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch National Growth Fund Programme Npuls (Regulation ‘IO: 112026’).

• In nops_fix(..., display = "interactive") there is now also a checkbox for rotating the PNG of a scanned sheet.

• In exams2pdf() the handling of duplicated graphics file names now also works for pandoc versions 3.2.1 or greater. Previously, the addition of \pandocbounded{} interfered with the correct handling (reported by Delia Gramm).

• Added support for \pandocbounded{} (as well as some other LaTeX packages) in the default template for exams2pandoc(), mirroring changes that had been done in earlier versions for the exams2pdf() and exams2nops() templates (reported in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79829958/).

• In the manual page ?exams2ilias it is now explained rather explicitly that many features of the resulting QTI exports cannot be imported correctly into recent versions of ILIAS. Any ILIAS users who have some experience in QTI XML who would be willing to help with the R/exams interface are encouraged to get in touch.

• In exams2moodle(), exams2qti12() (and hence also in exams2canvas()), and exams2qti21() (and hence also in exams2openolat()) the argument seed has been added and is simply passed on to xexams(). This allows to fix the random seeds for generating the exercise pools in these functions.

• New arguments exams2nops(..., shortquiz = FALSE, filbreak = FALSE). With shortquiz = TRUE it is possible to create a short quiz that contains the questions directly at the bottom of a single exam sheet. Setting filbreak = TRUE a potential page break can be added at the beginning of each question, so that it is more likely that all parts of a question appear on the same page.

• Additional NOPS language support: Basque (eu, contributed by Jone Guenetxea Gorostiza & Iker Apraiz Sánchez).

• In exams2nops() the \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} is not included anymore in order to facilitate setting texengine = "xelatex" or "lualatex". The setting is also not needed anymore in pdfLaTeX because it is the default since 2018.

• In exams2nops(..., language = "de") the latest new German hyphenation patterns are loaded by \babelprovide[hyphenrules=ngerman-x-latest]{ngerman} (raised by Florian Hauser).

• Examples from the manual page of exams2nops() are now excluded from the CRAN checks because they can sometimes take more than 5 seconds depending on the LaTeX setup. Instead a dedicated tests/exams2nops.R test file is included now.

• MIME type handling for Base 64 coding of supplementary files has been improved. Some more MIME types have been added to the lookup table and text vs binary guessing has been added for unknown file types.

• The handling of | symbols in the exsolution meta-information has been improved somewhat. The code still aims to support exsolution values containing regular expressions but is somewhat more robust compared to the previous version. However, there are still limitations and future improvements are planned. Users who run into problems with | in the exsolution are encouraged to get in touch.

• Numeric values in the meta-information of R/Markdown exercises are now recovered more reliably, even when knitr switches to scientific notation by default (reported by Delia Gramm).

• The pointvec() function set up by exams_eval(partial = TRUE, ...) now warns when it is applied to mchoice answers without correct answer alternatives (because it is impossible to attain any credits in that case).

• In exams2qti21() (and hence also exams2openolat()) it is now assured that essay and file interactions in cloze exercises are always outside of a paragraph.

• New function match_exams_markup() can be used within an exercise to use the same text markup ("markdown" vs. "latex") that xweave() is using.

• New argument answerlist(..., write = TRUE) which can be set to FALSE in order to return the answerlist text, rather than writing it to the output.

• HTML and Markdown converters now try harder to preserve file names in download links when encoding supplementary files in Base64.

• In nops_scan() the shaving of long text above the exam ID box is improved (reported in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79835752 by Florian Oswald). Furthermore, an informative error is thrown now if the scanner markings cannot be found when reading a PNG file (reported by Filipe Alberto).

• Bug fix in nops_eval() for exams with string scans and duplicated exam IDs. Now the duplicates are dropped prior to evaluation along with a warning. Previously, the string scans were erroneously omitted (reported in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79838688 by Samuel Merk).

• In answerlist() the default markup is now determined via match_exams_markup() (rather than using "latex").

exams 2.4-2

• Bug fix in exams2moodle() for cloze exercises: The rule was erroneously applied not only to to mchoice but also to schoice elements within cloze exercises. Hence incorrect answers in schoice elements were erroneously penalized with negative points by default (reported in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79235737/ by Beatriz Lacruz Casaucau and in https://R-Forge.R-project.org/forum/message.php?msg_id=50046 by Błażej Kochański and in https://R-Forge.R-project.org/forum/message.php?msg_id=50063 by Martin Spott).

• Support of string scans in nops_fix(). Moreover, a new option nops_fix(display = "interactive") was added where all data from a scanned sheet can be edited interactively in the browser (contributed by Sebastian Bachler). The latter is particularly useful if scanned sheets are too rotated to be read at all in nops_scan(). Finally, the rotation of PDF pages is always done relatively (rather than absolutely) in order to enable merging PDF files with different original orientations.

• Improvements in nops_scan() to read the registration id somewhat more reliably in the presence of scanning artefacts (e.g., single white lines through a check box). Also scanner markings are found more reliably when the bottom margin is smaller than in the PDF from exams2nops(). And the top left scanner marking is approximated in case it is missing in the sheet for some reason. Finally, the rotate = TRUE option also works for PNG and not just PDF input.

• Improvement in nops_eval(..., interactive = TRUE): If changes are made in the scans or string_scans files, then the original files are overwritten in the original directory rather than the working directory (reported by Chat Wacharamanotham).

• In exsolution the | can now not only be used as the separator symbol for multiple solutions in a cloze exercise but additionally within the solutions. This is useful for example when the answer string is a regular expression. In this case the | has to be within round brackets (and possibly ^ and/or $), e.g., exsolution: ^(OLS|ML)$|01001. This gets interpreted as two elements with values ^(OLS|ML)$ and 01001.

• In exams2pdf() the convenience argument usepackage = NULL was added. If specified with a character string, e.g., usepackage = "pdfpages", then "\\usepackage{pdfpages}" is added to the header argument.

• The default header argument in exams2pdf() is now empty (NULL) so that all LaTeX templates shipped with the package (in particular plain.tex) could be augmented with a %% \exinput{header} placeholder.

• The {Sweave} LaTeX package is no longer loaded in the LaTeX templates (like plain.tex, exams.tex, solution.tex, etc.). Instead the LaTeX environments for displaying R code and the accompanying LaTeX dependencies are loaded directly. Moreover, {xcolor} is used instead of {color}.

• New demo exercise flags.Rmd/flags.Rnw added to the package, containing a single-choice knowledge quiz question about flags of countries around the world. The flags are displayed using Unicode characters unless PDF output is produced via LaTeX (using exams2pdf() or exams2nops()). In the latter case the {worldflags} LaTeX package is needed for compilation which can be added now via usepackage = "worldflags" in exams2pdf() (see above) as well as exams2nops().

• New demo exercise sumdiff.Rmd/sumdiff.Rnw added to the package, providing a minimal arithmetic task where the sum of two random numbers minus their difference has to be calculated. This exercise can demonstrate drawing random numbers where the correct solution is not completely obvious but can still be easily obtained with mental arithmetic. Also, no LaTeX markup is used. Hence the exercise is much simpler than deriv.Rmd/deriv.Rnw.

• New argument exams2nops(..., helvet = TRUE). By default, exams2nops() uses a Helvetica font via the LaTeX packages {helvet} and {sfmath} (with helvet option). This can optionally be suppressed now (suggested by Bruce James in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79545467/).

• Improved num_to_schoice() by adding several new arguments but making their defaults backward compatible (based on suggestions from Stefan Jansen and Reto Stauffer).

  • format = TRUE: Should the question list be formatted to a character vector with LaTeX math markup (default)? Alternatively, the question list can be numeric (format = FALSE or "numeric") or a formatted character vector without LaTeX math markup (format = "character").
  • order = getOption("num_to_schoice_order", FALSE): Should the question list be ordered numerically? If FALSE (default) the question list is shuffled randomly.
  • maxit = getOption("num_to_schoice_maxit", Inf): Maximum number of iterations to try to find a feasible set of wrong solutions for the question list.

  Moreover, the option for setting the verbose default was changed to getOption("num_to_schoice_verbose", TRUE) instead of the previous name "num_to_choice_warnings" for consistency.

• When running exercises via knitr::knit() warnings are now reported to the console rather than being suppressed. This is achieved by setting knitr::opts_chunk$set(warning = NA) which was actually intended in the corresponding change in R/exams 2.4-0 where the default error = FALSE was implemented. If any exercise wants to change the behavior it can set another chunk option (either for individual chunks or for the entire exercise).

• New argument stop_on_error in stresstest_exercise(). This is particularly useful when stresstesting a collection of exercises without stopping on each error but instead recordings all warnings and errors for inspecting them later. Additionally, a timeout argument can be set that sets a time limit for running each exercises, e.g., to avoid running into infinite loops etc. Finally, maxit is set by default to -10000 so that num_to_schoice() (if used at all) can use at most 10000 iterations to find a feasible question list (and stops with an error otherwise).

• Added a warning in exams2arsnova() and make_exams_write_arsnova() that these functions will be removed in future versions of the package. The reason is that ARSnova has been superseded by Particify and hence it is recommended to transition to exams2particify().

• Changed default HTML/mathematics converter in exams2canvas() to converter = "pandoc-mathjax" (rather than enforcing MathML output as before). Recent versions of Canvas have improved MathJax support (see Canvas Release Notes 2021-02-20) and employing MathJax in the Canvas quiz might facilitate importing the quiz into a Canvas question bank (reported and tested by Jeff Pisklak).

• Additional NOPS language support: Catalan (ca, contributed by Paco Rivière).

• In exams2pdf() an empty getOption("pdfviewer") is now caught with an informative error (raised in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79100895/).

• Function match_exams_iteration(), introduced in the previous versions, was erroneously not exported from the NAMESPACE, added now.

• Fixed long-standing bug in boxplots exercise. In rare cases (about once in 2,000 random versions) the exercises claimed that there were outliers in the plot when in fact there were none (reported by Gabriele Cantaluppi). Also, the explanation for outliers is now aligned with that of non-outliers being more/less than 1.5 times the IQR from the box, rather than the median (reported by Stefan Jansen).

• All Rmd exercise templates with embedded graphics have been slightly simplified. The lines with just \ before the figure code chunks have been replaced with empty lines. Initially, the \ lines had been necessary to suppress figure captions but this has not been necessary anymore for a long time.

• Improve handling of duplicated textattachmentfile names in exams2pdf() (reported by Francisco Goerlich).

• In exams2moodle(..., cloze = list(enumerate = FALSE)) (the default since version 2.4-1) elements of questionlist did not get any formatting, they are paragraphs now (reported by Błażej Kochański).

• In exams2canvas() for cloze exercises with multiple schoice interactions (rendered as multiple dropdown selections), the question list items are now converted to plain text (rather than HTML) because no HTML rendering is available in the Canvas dropdown selections (reported by Chad Worley). Note that this might work correctly but formatting (especially for mathematical notation) will be lost.

• The default QTI 1.2 template in exams2canvas() (namely canvas_qti12.xml) now declares the xmlns etc. for the <questestinterop> tag which may sometimes help in the import in Canvas (suggested by Andrew Leach).

• When read_exercise() is applied to cloze exercises including schoice/mchoice elements and using a numeric exshuffle value, then no warning is issued if exshuffle is greater than some choice lists - as long as there is at least one choice list with length at least as long as exshuffle (suggested by Delia Gramm).

exams 2.4-1

• New function nops_fix() that can be applied to the ZIP file resulting from nops_scan(). By default it goes through all rows of the scanned data and interactively prompts for updates to fields from the scanned exam sheets that need updating. Optionally, the user can specify the rows of the scanned data and/or the fields that should be updated.

• By default, nops_scan() now relies on the R packages qpdf and magick for merging/rotating/splitting PDF files and converting them to PNG, respectively. Thus, the system requirements of PDFTk (pdftk) and ImageMagick (convert), respectively, are not necessary anymore for scanning NOPS exams. However, for a transition period the old system calls for PDFTk/ImageMagick are still used when the R packages qpdf and/or magick are not available.

• The default evaluation rule in exams2moodle() and all QTI-based exams2xyz() interfaces (e.g., exams2blackboard(), exams2canvas(), exams2openolat(), etc.) is now consistently partial = TRUE and negative = FALSE (as in previous versions) and rule = "false2". This was already the default rule in most scenarios in previous versions. But for mchoice elements within cloze exercises it often was "none" (i.e., no negative points even when partial credits were used) which has been changed to the more commonly-used rule = "false2" now. (Reported by Hans-Peter Schröcker.)

• In exams2qti21() (and thus also in exams2openolat()) fractional points are now rounded up (if necessary) at eight decimal places. Otherwise the cutvalue might not be attained, especially for partial = FALSE. (Reported by Thomas Fetz.)

• Convenience extension for cloze exercises with elements embedded by ##ANSWERi## tags: The “Answerlist” only has to be specified if there are schoice/mchoice elements, otherwise it can be omitted. For exercises with mixed elements, the “Answerlist” only has to specify the entries of the schoice/mchoice elements while the empty entries for all other num or string/essay/file elements can optionally be omitted.

• New standard meta-information types exauthor and extags. The latter is for tagging an exercise so that it can eventually be filtered, grouped, etc. A typical example for an extags is extags: poisson which could signal that an exercise is related to the Poisson distribution. Note that this might complement the hierarchical exsection meta-information which can be used for hierarchical grouping, e.g., exsection: regression/glm/poisson. Finally, extags can define tag classes/group by adding a = as in extags: grade=2 or extags: stage=advanced etc. Multiple tags can be separated by |.

• In schoice and mchoice questions an error (rather than just a warning) is thrown when the lengths of the question list and the exsolution do not match. Also, the reading of question lists is more robust now for Markdown exercises.

• New convenience function match_exams_iteration() that can be used within an exercise to query the current iteration (within n replications), e.g., to always cycle through the same finite set of parameters.

• Improvement in nops_scan() when finding the bottom markings of the scan. A smaller minimal bottom margin is assumed (3% instead of 7%) in order to better deal with different paper formats, specifically letter paper (reported by Perry de Valpine).

• Improvement in nops_eval() so that for schoice questions no partial credits are used even if they are enabled for mchoice questions in the eval specification.

• Additional NOPS language support: Bulgarian (bg, contributed by Nikolay Rachev) and Polish (pl, contributed by Paweł Kleka). Corrections in French (fr, contributed by Jean-Philippe Georget), Russian (ru, contributed by Nikolay Rachev), and Spanish (es, contributed by Flavio Lozano Isla).

• Various exams2xyz() interfaces gained arguments envir = NULL and/or engine = NULL. Both are passed on to xweave(). The envir argument can be used to control in which environment all exercises are processed in case knitr is used. The engine argument specifies whether "Sweave" (default) or "knitr" is used for rendering Rnw exercises. These arguments have been added in: exams2arsnova(), exams2blackboard(), exams2grasple(), exams2html(), exams2lops(), exams2moodle(), exams2pandoc(), exams2qti12() (and hence interfaces based on it like exams2canvas()), exams2qti21() (and hence interfaces based on it like exams2openolat()), exams2testvision().

• In Rmd exercises only the meta-information tags (extype, exsolution, etc.) from the Meta-information are read. If the same tags occur elsewhere in the file they are ignored now. (Reported by Joan Sanz.)

• Include better table formatting by default in exams2moodle(). Styles table = "table_shade", "table_rule", and "table_grid" had already been available since version 2.4-0, but table = "table_shade" is now the new default. Alternatively, users can also set a custom table class and then use the css argument for controlling the rendering of that class.

• In exams2moodle(), exams2testvision(), exams2qti12(), and exams2qti21() (and all interfaces built on top of these like exams2openolat()) the default is now enumerate = FALSE (rather than TRUE) so that single-choice and multiple-choice answers are not listed with letters a., b., c., … The default was changed because it produces questions with less “clutter” but may make it a little bit harder to match solution lists in the feedback to the item lists in the question.

• In exams2moodle() the string elements in cloze exercises now also correctly support the usecase = TRUE option (reported by Joan Sanz).

• In exams2moodle() the eval for schoice exercises is now correctly processed in case of negative points (reported in 78581471 on StackOverflow).

• In both matrix_to_schoice() and matrix_to_mchoice() the handling of vector (rather than matrix) inputs is improved. In this case the question list shows only a single index for the chosen element(s) rather than row and column indexes (suggested by Thomas Fetz).

• Further improved name handling in exams2qti21() (and thus also in exams2openolat()): Periods in file names are avoided (like spaces and leading integers) as OpenOlat otherwise cannot read the file (reported by Andrea Erhart).

• The default in exams2particify() was changed to fix_choice = FALSE because most Particify systems in use will probably support the math rendering in answer options now. So the fixup does not need to be enabled by default. Also, the function now tries to assure Unix-style linebreaks on Windows systems because the default Windows linebreaks could lead to problems with reading the correct answers.

• New argument exams2nops(..., newpage = FALSE). If set to TRUE a page break (\newpage in LaTeX) is added after every exercise.

• The logo in exams2nops(..., logo = ...) can now also be a relative path (relative to the working directory). Also logo = "uibk" is supported as a convenience option for including the logo of Universität Innsbruck.

• The exam type in exams2nops() now codes the number of exercises directly (rather than rounding the number to multiples of 5). This facilitates fixing the correct number of questions in nops_fix().

• The answer lists in exams2nops() are now labeled \alph{enumii}. rather than (\alph{enumii}). Also the main exam sheet also uses \alph{} with a custom counter to label the check boxes for the answers.

• When converting exercises with a converter based on make_exercise_transform_pandoc() to Markdown with Base64 output, graphics in <img> tags are now correctly encoded as well.

• In all QTI-based interfaces (and also exams2moodle()) with exams2xyz(..., mchoice = list(enumerate = FALSE)) the solutionlist (if any) is formatted as an unordered list (rather than without any formatting).

• It is now also possible to extract the meta-information from the output of xexams() and all exams2xyz() interfaces as a data.frame (rather than a list of lists) via exams_metainfo(..., class = "data.frame").

• Scientific notation produced by knitr is now correctly converted to numeric when reading the meta-information. (Reported in questions 61254298 and 75766543 on StackOverflow.)

• The (total) number of points in exams2blackboard() is now formatted as %.3f rather than %d.0 so that it can also be fractional (with up to three decimal places) rather than integer.

• Various improvements in exams2testvision(), especially for cloze exercises combining various types of questions. In particular, a bug was fixed for cloze exercises with ##ANSWERi## tags which lead to unbalanced <div> tags in previous versions.

• Added support for \pandocbounded{} (as produced by pandoc starting from version 3.2.1) in all current LaTeX templates as well as exams2nops(). Currently, \pandocbounded{} does not anything in the exams templates so that the size of the graphics in PDF output still has to be controlled in one of the previously available ways (e.g., within the exercises, via the exams2xyz() interface, or via the Gin key in the LaTeX template).

• In read_metainfo() a warning is now issued if exclozetype is specified in the metainformation but extype is not cloze (suggested by Matthias Gondan).

exams 2.4-0

• Switched the entire package to support UTF-8 encodings by default for all exercises types. Previously, this was only the case for .Rmd exercises due to the UTF-8 requirement of pandoc (which is now a system requirement for exams). All templates etc. have been modified to support UTF-8 out-of-the-box. Support for all other encodings like ISO-8859-* (latin1, latin9, etc.), which had previously been available for .Rnw exercises in certain interfaces, has been disabled. While this reduces the functionality of the package slightly, it greatly facilitates working with UTF-8 which appears to be predominantly used in practice. Documentation also becomes easier/clearer.

• To facilitate working with .Rmd exercises and embedded graphics or data files base64enc, knitr, and rmarkdown are now imported in the package (and not just suggested).

• Several extensions in exams2qti21() (and thus inherited by exams2openolat()) that provide more control and options in the assessments.

  • Improved processing of the cutvalue (for passing a test/exam/quiz). By default, this is cutvalue = NULL (or equivalently cutvalue = NA) which means that no pass/fail status is computed at all, i.e., only the sum of the points is reported. Moreover, cutvalue may be a float now and is not coerced to an integer anymore (also applied in exams2qti12()).
  • New argument navigation = "nonlinear". This can be switched to "linear" enforcing that questions in the test must be answered sequentially while the default "nonlinear" means that participants can switch back and forth between questions.
  • New argument selection = "pool" that controls how exercises and sections are sampled. By default, the function creates one section for each exercise from which one replication will be selected in the exam. If selection = "exam" each section contains all questions and one section will be selected for the exam. The "exam" variant has the advantage that nsamp can be fully used now and that questions that build on each other can be used in the exam.
  • New argument shufflesections = FALSE can be set to TRUE in order to randomly shuffle the order of sections/exercises for each participant. For selection = "pool" this corresponds to shuffling the sections that contain the pools of exercises. For selection = "exam" it corresponds to shuffling the exercises within each exam section.
  • New argument cloze_schoice_display = "auto" that controls the display of schoice elementsin cloze exercises. By default, radio "buttons" are used if the answer list appears in its own paragraph and a "dropdown" menu is used if the answer list appears inline (and has no mathematical markup). Both options can also be enforced explicitly, independently from the answer list appearing in a separate paragraph or inline.
  • New argument allowskipping = TRUE controlling whether exercises can be skipped without answering (default) or must be answered.
  • New argument allowreview = FALSE controlling whether exercises can be viewed again at the end of a test/exam.
  • New argument allowcomment = FALSE can be set to TRUE to allow comments.
  • New argument casesensitive = TRUE that controls whether the evaluation of string exercises is case sensitive or not.
  • The default stitle (section title) and ititle (item title) are now NULL so that items are simply numbered consecutively (1, …, n) and section titles are omitted.
  • Similarly, the default sdescription is now empty omitting the section description as it is typically not necessary.
  • If solutionswitch = TRUE and maxattempts != 1 a warning is issued now. This is because with more than one attempt participants could otherwise copy the solution shown after an incorrect first attempt.
  • Also maxattempts can now be a vector so that different numbers of attempts per question are allowed for different sections/questions.

• An extended list of configuration options for OpenOlat assessments is now provided through the argument config = TRUE in exams2openolat(). The logical specification config = TRUE/FALSE uses the default configuration or switches off the extra configuration entirely, respectively. Moreover, a list of options like config = list(cancel = TRUE, scoreprogress = TRUE) can be provided for customizing how OpenOlat renders the QTI 2.1 content.

• Several extensions for cloze questions in exams2moodle():

  • mchoice elements in cloze questions are now properly supported. By default they are shown as MULTIRESPONSE checkboxes and employ Moodle’s default evaluation strategy where each incorrect box eliminates one correct box. A different evaluation strategy can, in principle, be chosen but Moodle might not process all negative points correctly.
  • schoice elements in cloze questions are still rendered as MULTICHOICE drop-down menus by default unless they contain math markup. As this is not rendered by Moodle in drop-down menus, a MULTICHOICE_V column of radio buttons is used in this case.
  • To allow for customization of both mchoice and schoice elements in cloze questions, the are now both cloze_mchoice_display and cloze_schoice_display arguments. This is not fully backward compatible because in previous versions cloze_mchoice_display was also used to customize schoice elements. Now a warning is issued in this case.
  • If choice items contained closing curly brackets, these would typically corrupt Moodle’s embedded answers for cloze questions which relies on curly brackets. Hence, these are properly escaped now.
  • Similarly closing curly brackets in the solutions to string items (SHORTANSWER) needed to be properly escaped.
  • To fix the maximum width of fill-in-the-blank cells in num and/or string sub-items (e.g., when presented in a table), arguments numwidth and stringwidth have been added to make_question_moodle(). Alternatively, they can also be specified through exextra tags in each exercise. See the fourfold2 exercise for an example and ?make_question_moodle for more details.

• For illustrating the new improved cloze capabilities in exams2moodle() and exams2qti21()/exams2openolat(), there is a new exercise “lm2” which combines all basic exercise types: num, schoice, mchoice, and string. Another extended version of this exercises, called “lm3”, has also been added which adds essay (text editor) and file upload interactions (see also below).

• Extended processing of string exercises for learning management systems like Moodle, OpenOlat, or other QTI-based systems. By default, string exercises are intended for closed-format short-text answers that have to be matched exactly by the participants. Additionally, open-ended text answers can now be enabled by setting the exstringtype meta-information to essay and/or file. The former requests a text editor for entering an answer while the latter requests a file upload dialogue. The “essayreg” exercise has been modified to leverage this new meta-information.

• Similarly, the exclozetype meta-information now also accepts essay or file instead of string for elements of a cloze exercise. Currently, the combination of these types with num or schoice elements etc. is only possible for QTI-based systems (i.e., OpenOlat in particular) but not for Moodle (whose cloze format does not support open-ended text answers). For illustration, see the new “essayreg2” and “lm3” exercises.

• Added new interface exams2ilias() for the open-source ILIAS learning management system (https://www.ilias.de/). This is essentially a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12(), tweaking a few defaults and employing a somewhat modified XML template. Not all question types are supported, though, mostly string questions with open-ended answers and multiple-choice and single-choice questions. Numeric and cloze questions are not supported, yet.

• Added first release version of new interface exams2testvision() for the Dutch testing platform TestVision. It is essentially a fork of exams2qti21() that incorporates TestVision’s own strict implementation of QTI 2.1. See the online tutorial on how to upload the zip output from exams2testvision() into the system by selecting it in the import menu and then moving the imported material to the appropriate directories. The work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Project code OL20-06), and the University of Amsterdam.

• Added first release version of new interface exams2grasple() for Grasple, a Dutch practice platform for mathematics and statistics education. It supports num and schoice questions which are exported to a zip file containing Grasple’s JSON format. Note that currently importing cannot be done by users themselves; it requires a request for manual import by a Grasple team member. The work on the function was financially supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Project code OL20-06), and the University of Amsterdam.

• Added new interface exams2particify() that can export exercises to a comma-separated values (CSV) format for import in the audience response system Particify (https://particify.de/), the successor to ARSnova. In particular, single-choice and multiple-choice exercises are fully supported while num and string question are converted to open-ended text questions.

• Added new interface exams2kahoot() that can export sufficiently simple single-choice and multiple-choice exercises to an Excel sheet via openxlsx::write.xlsx() that can be imported by the game-based learning platform Kahoot! at https://kahoot.com/ (suggested by Rushad Faridi). Exercises are converted to plain text and questions must not exceed 120 characters, answers must not exceed 75 characters.

• New experimental function moodle2exams() that can take a Moodle XML quiz file with numeric, multichoice, shortanswer, and essay exercises and convert them to R/exams exercise files, either in R/Markdown (Rmd, default) or R/LaTeX (Rnw) format. If the text formatting is more advanced (e.g., containing mathematical notation or tables etc.) the function might not lead to fully satisfactory results but still provide a useful starting point for subsequent manual editing.

• New function testvision2exams() to convert TestVision’s QTI 2.1 questions to R/exams exercise files, either in R/Markdown (Rmd, default) or R/LaTeX (Rnw) format. The supported TestVision question types are ‘invul (numeriek)’, ‘een-uit-meer’, ‘meer-uit-meer’, and ‘open’ which are converted to num, schoice, mchoice, and string, respectively.

• When running exercises via knitr::knit() errors in the R code will stop the evaluation now by default. This was always the default behavior for Rnw exercises (i.e., when processed with engine = "sweave") but now is also the default for Rmd exercises and for Rnw exercises via engine = "knitr". In exercises processed via knitr::knit() it is possible to carry on with code evaluation after errors (the default in knitr) by setting the chunk option error = TRUE. Similarly, the default handling of warnings has been set to warning = FALSE so that warnings are reported on the console rather than in the weaved/knitted exercises.

• Added new argument texengine = "pdflatex" to exams2pdf() which is passed on to tinytex::latexmk(..., engine = texengine). Provided that tinytex support is installed, this option can also be set to texengine = "xelatex" or "lualatex" for example.

• Added exams2blackboard(..., mathjax = NULL) that optionally embeds the MathJax <script> in each of the exercises so that mathematical content can be rendered by MathJax (rather than by the browser directly). The default is FALSE unless converter = "pandoc-mathjax" is used. But also for the default converters (producing MathML output) mathjax = TRUE can be used. (Suggested and tested by Sean Quallen and Gabriele Cantaluppi.)

• Improvements in exams2blackboard():

  • Rendering verbatim code chunks can be fixed from <pre> to <code> tags if fix_pre = TRUE (default) which is necessary in classical Blackboard systems.
  • Points can be specified through expoints.
  • Bug fix in when using shuffle = TRUE which used to lead to a missing closing bracket.

• The auxiliary functions from exams_eval() now explicitly distinguish between multiple-choice (mchoice) and single-choice (schoice) exercises provided that the type of exercise is provided to the functions. Consequently, schoice questions are now handled like num or string questions that can just be correct or wrong (and not like mchoice questions anymore). Partial credits are only supported for mchoice questions.

• Various improvemens in nops_scan(), especially for scanning the boxes pertaining to the student registration ID. Rather than reading a very small area around each box and just shaving off its borders, a larger area is read now and then shaved iteratively. Hence, setting it is also easily possible to further increase the size of the area which may sometimes lead to improved scanning results.

• Improved handling of reglength < 7 in exams2nops(). Internally, reglength = 7 is still enforced (and thus necessary in the registration CSV file) but the initial IDs are fixed to “0” in the exam sheet and corresponding boxes ticked already.

• Improved NOPS language support: Added Czech (cz, Jindřich Marek) and Galician (gl, Marta Sestelo & Nora M. Villanueva).

• New exercise template vowels.Rmd/vowels.Rnw contributed by Maria Paola Bissiri. This is a cloze exercise with schoice elements that is particularly well-suited for drop-down menus. It also illustrates how UTF-8 symbols (for Cardinal vowels) can be used in an exercise.

• Improved exams2canvas() (and underlying exams2qti12()): First, it is assured that the points per section/exercise are set correctly in the exported QTI code. Second, extended exstringtype support so that essay questions and file questions are also possible.

• Added new argument exams2moodle(..., forcedownload = FALSE) which when set to TRUE can force all supplementary links to be downloaded (rather than opened in the browser). Only supported if pluginfile = TRUE. If forcedownload = FALSE the behavior typically depends on the browser, user settings, and file type.

• Improvements in read_exercise():

  • exshuffle now works for cloze questions even if no solutionlist is provided. Generally, warnings have been improved. In particular, it is now checked whether the question list contains duplicated items for single-choice and multiple-choice exercises.
  • For cloze exercises with ##ANSWERi## placeholders it is checked that all necessary placeholders occur exactly once. Otherwise a warning is issued about missing and/or duplicated placeholders.

• Bug fix in extract_environment() underlying read_exercise(): When Markdown tables were formatted with just --- markup (rather that |---|) some lines in the table were erroneously forced to lower case (reported by Ulrike Groemping).

• Improvement in extract_command() underlying read_exercise(): For Sweave exercises leading and trailing spaces are now also removed (as they always were for Markdown exercises, pointed out by Ulrich Morawetz).

• Interfaces exams2html(), exams2pdf(), and exams2pandoc() gained an argument exshuffle = NULL which can be modified to overrule the exshuffle setting within an exercise (if any). For example, setting exams2xyz(..., exshuffle = FALSE) retains the full answerlist without any permutation.

• When using pandoc as the converter to HTML with multiple options, e.g., converter = "pandoc-mathml-ascii", then the options were collapsed to a single string whereas rmarkdown::pandoc_convert() expects them as a vector (for checking them). Furthermore, internally, before calling pandoc_convert(), the default for --wrap is changed to preserved (rather than auto) and for --columns to 99999 (rather than 72) in order to assure that tables are processed correctly, in particular for PDF output.

• Improved formatting in exams2pdf() for cloze exercises with embedded ##ANSWERi## tags. The formatting of the question in that case is improved and the question list is not displayed anymore - analogously to exams2html().

• Bug fix for pandoc-based HTML conversion of LaTeX equations containing \not. These are now converted to \neq, \nless, \ngtr, \nleq, \ngeq which are handled by pandoc correctly. Notably, this affects exercise template cholesky.Rmd.

• The extol metainformation is now processed more flexibly and reliably in read_metainfo(): First, it is now enforced to be non-negative. If a negative value is provided by the exercise, a warning is issued and 0 is used instead. Second, for cloze exercises the length of extol needs to be either (a) 1 (and is then recycled for all num elements) or (b) the number of of num elements (and is then matched correspondingly) or (c) the number of all cloze elements (and then is assumed to match correspondingly).

• Improved the string representation in metainfo of exercises and corresponding printing in print.exams_metainfo(). For cloze exercises tolerances of numeric elements are reported. For single-choice and multiple-choice exercises lower-case letters (instead of integer indexes) are used to incide the correct elements (provided that there are not more than 26 elements).

• In all mchoice exercise templates provided within the package it is now assured that there is at least one correct and one wrong choice item. This is necessary for some learning management systems like Moodle or Canvas because otherwise they cannot be scored correctly (specifically when using partial credits). This necessitated changes in the following exercise templates in the package: anova, automaton, boxplots, cholesky, relfreq, scatterplot. Consequently, these templates are not fully backward compatible with their earlier versions. Further improvements were made in automaton and relfreq.

• matrix_to_mchoice() gained a new argument restricted = FALSE which can be set to TRUE in order to assure that there is at least one correct and one wrong solution/comparison in the list of choice items. The option restricted = TRUE is used in the cholesky.Rmd/cholesky.Rnw exercise now.

• In exams2pdf() when auto-generating a questionnaire, the _ is now escaped within the \exstring{} command.

• Added envir argument in exams2qti12() and exams2qti21() that is passed on to xweave(). This allows to re-use variables generated in one exercise in previous exercises, e.g., for creating a sequence of variables based on the same data set. However, some learning-management systems do not the drawing of random questions to the same replication. In that case, this will typically only be useful for exams with a single random replication. A notable exception are systems based on QTI 2.1 that can process the output of exams2qti21(..., selection = "exam") (like OpenOlat).

• In xexams() a new argument rds = FALSE was added that indicates whether the list returned by the function should also be saved as an RDS data file. If rds = TRUE the file name metainfo.rds is used but alternatively rds can also be specified as a character file name to be used. The new rds argument is leveraged in exams2blackboard(), exams2moodle(), exams2pdf(), exams2html(), exams2qti12(), and exams2qti21(), as well as other interfaces built on top of these.

• To avoid accidental deletion of files in pre-existing temporary directories xexams() now assures that the tdir is not identical to the output directory dir or the exercise directory edir. Also, the documentation of tdir in the manual pages has been made even more explicit.

• In {answerlist} definitions for exams2pdf() and exams2nops() the enumii counter is used correctly now (rather than enumi as in previous versions). As all templates provided in R/exams aimed to set the counter formatting that is used by default for enumii in LaTeX (namely (a), (b), …) the difference was never noticed up to now.

• Tolerate trailing white spaces in section names for environments like question, solution, answerlist, etc. in R/Markdown exercises.

• Bug fix in exams2moodle() which did not process pluginfile correctly when the supplementary files contained a + symbol - as produced by expar() temporary files. The latter now also use _ instead of + in the file name. (Reported by Nina Timmesfeld.)

• In exams2pdf() it is now assured that name and template are always of the same length (with a warning if name is too short). (Reported by JPMD.)

• When reading {answerlist} environments in read_metainfo() now a warning is issued if there is further text in the same line as the begin or end of the environment. Also parsing the individual items now also works tab-indented items. (Reported by Sebastian Kupek.)

• Use gfm instead of the depracated markdown_github to convert to GitHub-flavored Markdown in exams2arsnova(). As this uses hex encodings for character entities, the default sep in make_exercise_transform_pandoc() is changed to a plain ASCII separator.

• Improve handling of duplicated graphics file names in exams2pdf() (Reported by Eduardo Uresti Charre).

• In xweave() the highlight = FALSE (default) option is now handled by actually setting highlight = TRUE in combination with lang = "" for Rmd exercises. The background for this is that recent versions the LaTeX conversion of pandoc does not yield {verbatim} environments for text-chunks anymore. Only plain chunks are converted to {verbatim}.

exams 2.3-6

• Properly test for pandoc availability in nops_language() examples.

exams 2.3-5

• New function expar() that helps to fix parameters (defined in the first code chunk of an exercise). For example expar("deriv.Rmd", a = 1, c = 0) generates a temporary file where the parameters a and c of the deriv.Rmd exercise are fixed to the values 1 and 0, respectively. This can then be processed with exams2xyz() “as usual”.

• Added tinytex::latexmk() as an alternative to tools::texi2dvi() when converting to PDF output (exams2nops(), exams2pdf(), …) as suggested by Yihui Xie. The default is to use tinytex if(requireNamespace("tinytex")). However, by setting options(exams_tex = "tools") instead of exams_tex = "tinytex" the old behavior can be enforced even if tinytex is installed. When no other LaTeX distribution (like TeXLive or MikTeX) is installed, yet, tinytex::install_tinytex() can easily install the TeXLive-based TinyTeX system.

• Started enabling setting random seeds for each individual exercise in an exam, to enable custom exercise selection (e.g., when only putting together a single exam). Currently, only supported in xexams(), exams2pdf(), exams2html(), exams2nops(), and exams2blackboard().

• To make the fixed seeds above applicable to static exercises where only the exshuffle tag is enabled, the seed is not only set prior to weaving but also to reading the exercise.

• Improved random shuffling if exshuffle is numeric where previously the correct solution(s) were not completely randomly distributed across the possible answers.

• In addition to the vector or list specification of the exercise file in the exams2xyz() interfaces, file can now also be a matrix. This enables customization of the exact selection of exercises in each exam. The seed can be a matrix of the same dimension. Currently, only supported in xexams(), exams2pdf(), exams2html(), exams2nops(), and exams2blackboard().

• Improved NOPS language support: Added Korean (ko, Saewon Jeong), Japanese (ja, Kohei Watanabe), Norwegian (Bokmal, no, Tormod Boe), Slovenian (sl, Matjaz Jeran), Vietnamese (vi, Tran Thi Hoang Ha). Some languages require that markboth/pagestyle are set after \begin{document} and that a \newpage is included directly before \end{document}, both of which were adapted correspondingly.

• Improvements in nops_eval(): Show exam ID in HTML report and round points to four digits. The language= file paths do not have to be absolute anymore. For interactive checking/fixing of registration IDs the width of scanned subimage is now adapted according to the reglength. The default converter for the HTML report is now "pandoc".

• The actual writing of nops_eval() results has been modularized (with contributions from Kenji Sato). Different nops_eval_write_<flavor> functions can be plugged in. At the moment there is only the default writer (optimized for OpenOlat) but further flavors are planned (including a standalone workflow and one for Moodle).

• Function nops_language() is now exported as part of the user interface (only internal previously). Based on a language specification in a DCF file this sets up a list with language texts (possibly converted to HTML).

• New exercise capitals.Rmd/Rnw that illustrates how a certain number of true/false items can be chosen randomly from a longer list. The exercise can also be switched from mchoice to schoice without any further necessary modifications. Finally, the exercise illustrates that UTF-8 encoding is needed for the Rmd version while in the Rnw version the few special characters can be coded in ASCII using LaTeX commands.

• All LaTeX templates that use \fontfamily{phv} now also gained a \usepackage{helvet} to ensure that the corresponding LaTeX packages are installed. When using tinytex (see above) the corresponding LaTeX packages will be installed if not yet available upon first usage.

• In R/Markdown exercises the question/solution answerlist can now use not only * but also - as the symbol for bullet points (suggested by Ben Kasel).

• Fixed a bug in exams2pdf() where the case of multiple duplicated supplement names was not handled correctly (reported by TwelveFifths on StackOverflow).

• Improved xexams() so that full file paths to exercise files also work on Windows.

• read_metainfo() now assures a non-NULL exname. The default is to use “R/exams exercise”.

• Fixed a bug in extract_items() which incorrectly dropped the last element in an answerlist if it was completely empty (even without a trailing space). This was a problem for cloze exercises with ##ANSWER## patterns, leading to a questionlist that was too short (reported by Julia Guggenberger).

• Various fixes and improvements in exams2qti21() (and thus inherited by exams2openolat()): Support of cloze and essay type exercises has been much improved, fixing bugs in the XML and metainformation handling. String exercises work again. The internally-generated XML labels are more robust now avoiding spaces and leading integers.

• Dependency on R >= 3.4.0 now which enables plugging a custom svg device into Sweave(). In previous versions of the package a workaround was included that works for R < 3.4.0 (but required writing into the global environment which is avoided now).

exams 2.3-4

• Avoid execution of examples on CRAN that would necessitate pandoc availability. Currently, the rmarkdown package but not the underlying pandoc support is installed for the CRAN checks on Solaris and OS X.

exams 2.3-3

• Added new interface exams2canvas() for the open-source Canvas learning management system (https://www.instructure.com/canvas). This is essentially a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12() along with a few Canvas-specific modifications of the QTI XML specification. The function has only received limited testing so far and is likely to improve in future version. The supported exercise types are num, schoice, mchoice, and string (but not cloze, yet).

• The default in exams2moodle() has been changed to converter = "pandoc-mathjax". Thus, instead of relying on the browser to render mathematical notation from MathML, the MathJax plugin is now assumed to be enabled on the Moodle server (which is the default when setting up a new Moodle server). To employ MathML one can use converter = NULL or converter = "pandoc-mathml" etc. See the discussion at https://www.R-exams.org/tutorials/math/ for more details.

• exams_skeleton() has been updated. The new default is markup = "markdown" as this appears to be the more common choice for newcomers to R/exams. Furthermore, the list of exercises in the demo-*.R scripts has been updated to use newer exercises as well (along with links to the web page: https://www.R-exams.org/templates/).

• Assure in nops_scan() that scanned image file names contain no spaces.

• Fixed bugs in exams2qti21() (and hence exams2openolat()) for certain combinations of maxchars specifications in string exercises.

• Added \usepackage[...]{babel} support to language specification of exams2nops(). In addition to a new Babel: ... field, the DCF file can also provide a Header: ... field, e.g., for changing the font encoding or adding further options.

• For convenience, when exams2html(..., converter = "pandoc-mathjax"), mathjax = TRUE is added automatically (unless explicitly switched off).

• Added envir argument in exams2moodle() that is passed on to xweave().

• The print() method for exams_metainfo objects received a new block argument so that print(exams_metainfo(x), which = 1, block = 5) prints the metainformation (type/solution) of the first exam in the object x (output from any exams2xyz() function) in blocks of 5 exercises.

• For exams2openolat() the handling of the internal pandoc fixups was extended to replace align="right" in tables with style="text-align: right;" (and analogously for "left" and "center").

• In nops_eval() duplicated sheets (original and replacement) were sometimes omitted even if the student ID was just 000000 (i.e., not read correctly by nops_scan()). A check has been added that avoids this.

• Changed the default of fix_choice in exams2arsnova(). Current versions of the official ARSnova server (arsnova.eu) have the LaTeX rendering in the choice options switched off. Hence, by setting fix_choice = TRUE by default the LaTeX math markup is removed.

• Add \setkeys{Gin}{keepaspectratio} in the default exams2pdf() template for pandoc (plain8.tex) and in exams2nops(). This is necessitated by a change in pandoc that now always sets height=\textheight when width= is specified (see https://pandoc.org/faqs.html).

exams 2.3-2

• nops_scan() gained a new argument trim = 0.3 that controls how much of check boxes is trimmed in order to shave the borders prior to determining the average gray level. In versions up to 2.3-1 this implicitly had a value of 0.25 hard-coded. Now the default was increased to 0.3 in order to shave box borders more reliably.

• nops_scan() tries to process registration numbers more reliably. In case one of the registration columns contains more than one potential mark, the heuristics of determining the intended mark have been improved.

• New exercise confint3.Rmd/Rnw that illustrates how to use the "verbatim" clozetype for Moodle. The exercises yields 100% of the points for the correct solution based on t quantiles but still 50% for a partially correct solution based on normal quantiles (contributed by Ulrike Groemping).

• nops_eval() gained a new argument labels = NULL that can be used to give labels for the marks that differ from the default (length(mark) + 1):1.

• In all LaTeX templates that use Helvetica (phv) as the font for the main text, this is also used now in math mode by \usepackage[helvet]{sfmath} (rather than \usepackage{sfmath}, as employed previously). In particular, this also affects exams2nops() and tex2image() output.

• In exams2nops() the header argument can also be specified simply as header = "\\mycommand{value}" rather than header = list(mycommand = "value"). The former is more flexible, e.g., for passing additional options or more complex commands. Internally, the former is turned into an unnamed list which is then processed correspondingly by exams2pdf().

• Various bug fixes in exams2qti21() pertaining to points and correct/incorrect computations for schoice/mchoice exercises.

• New language support in exams2nops: Russian (ru, contributed by Boris Demeshev) and Serbian (sr, contributed by Tatjana Kecojevic). Croatian (hr) was streamlined along with Serbian (by Tatjana Kecojevic).

• In include_supplement() an argument target = NULL was added to optionally include the supplement with a different file name than the original file name.

• Bug fix in the pandoc interface which previously erroneously produced unbalanced

  tags in certain situations.

• Rather than fully importing the basic dependencies stats, graphics, grDevices, tools, and utils, the required functions are imported selectively only. (Issue raised by Florian Oswald.)

exams 2.3-1

• Added new interface exams2openolat() for the open-source OpenOlat learning management system (https://www.openolat.com/). This is only a convenience wrapper to exams2qti12() or exams2qti21() with some dedicated tweaks for optimizing MathJax output for OpenOlat.

• When using exams2html(..., mathjax = TRUE) for testing purposes, mathjax.rstudio.com is used now rather than cdn.mathjax.org which is currently redirecting and will eventually be shut down completely.

• Bug fixes and improvements in HTML transformers:

  • Only ="file.ext" (with =") is replaced now by Base 64 version.
  • href="file.ext" is replaced by href="file.ext" download="file.ext" prior to Base 64 replacement.
  • alt="file.ext" and download="file.ext" are preserved without Base 64 encoding.

• In exams2html() and other interfaces based on make_exercise_transform_html() base64 = TRUE now uses Base 64 encoding for all file extensions (known to the package) whereas base64 = NULL only encodes image files (previous default behavior).

• After setting a random seed exams2nops() and exams2pdf() now yield the same random versions of the exercises. Previously, this was not the case because exams2nops() internally generates a single random trial exam first for a couple of sanity checks. Now, the .GlobalEnv$.Random.seed is restored after generating the trial exam.

• Fixed the support for nsamp argument in exams2nops(). Furthermore, current limitations of exams2nops() are pointed out more clearly and error messages and edge cases caught.

• Include further file URIs for Base 64 supplements, in particular .sav for SPSS data files.

• New language support in exams2nops(): Croatian (hr, contributed by Krunoslav Juraic), Danish (da, contributed by Tue Vissing Jensen & Jakob Messner), Slovak (sk, contributed by Peter Fabsic), Swiss German (gsw, contributed by Reto Stauffer), Turkish (tr, contributed by Emrah Er). Furthermore, Portuguese has been distinguished into pt-PT (Portuguese Portuguese) vs. pt-BR (Brazilian Portuguese) with pt defaulting to the former (contributed by Thomas Dellinger).

• include_supplement(..., dir = "foo") now also works if "foo" is sub-directory to the exercise directory (edir).

• Allow varying points within a certain exercise in nops_eval().

• exams2blackboard(..., base64 = FALSE, ...) was erroneously ignored. No matter how base64 was specified essentially base64 = TRUE was used, it is honored again now.

• Fixed a bug in stresstest_exercise() where the “rank” (previously called “order”) of the correct solution was computed incorrectly. Enhancement in plots and labels.

• Fixed a bug for tex2image(..., tikz = TRUE) where erroneously \usetikzlibrary{TRUE} was included. Also tex2image(..., Sweave = TRUE) (the default) did not run properly on Windows, fixed now.

• New function include_tikz() that facilitates compiling standalone tikz figures and including it in an exercise (especially for non-LaTeX-based output).

• Added support for \tightlist (as produced by pandoc) in all current LaTeX templates as well as exams2nops().

• \exshuffle{<num>} can now also be used for schoice exercises with more than one true answer. In a first step only one of the true answers is selected and then <num>-1 items from the false answers.

• Better warnings if \exshuffle{<num>} could not be honored due to a lack of sufficiently many (suitable) answer alternatives.

• Enable passing of envir argument from exams2html() to xweave() in case of Rmd exercises.

• Bug fix in CSV export of exams2arsnova(). Recent ARSnova versions use “mc” (rather than “MC”) and “abcd” (rather than “SC”) for multiple-choice and single-choice questions, respectively.

exams 2.3-0

• A new web page accompanying the package is now available at https://www.R-exams.org/. This already contains a first overview of the package, some tutorials, and a gallery of all exercise templates provided in the package. More tutorials will follow in the form of blog articles.

• A few exercise templates were slightly changed or improved for the new web page. Hence slightly different formulations or formatting may be used in some places.

• tex2image() has been rewritten to use the LaTeX class {standalone} instead of manually handling boxes and cropping of the PDF output. For converting to raster graphics like PNG (the default), R package magick is now used rather than system("convert ...") calls to ImageMagick on the system. For conversion to SVG it is still necessary to call pdfcrop and pdf2svg on via system().

• More fixups in LaTeX code prior to processing with pandoc_convert(), especially \url{...} is replaced by \href{...}{\texttt{...}} now to ensure typesetting in typewriter font.

• When including R input code chunks in Rmd exercises, code decoration is switched off by default now (knitr option highlight = FALSE) so that the output can be combined with standard LaTeX templates. The default can be changed either in the individual Rmd code chunks, e.g., {r, highlight=TRUE}, or by setting highlight = TRUE in the call to xweave(). For the latter case a new LaTeX template plain-highlight.tex is also provided, e.g., to be used via: exams2pdf("lm.Rmd", highlight = TRUE, template = "plain-highlight")

• exams2pdf() gained an argument texdir = NULL. By default a temporary directory is created for running LaTeX (and cleaned up subsequently). But using texdir = "/path/to/dir" an output directory can be specified so that the LaTeX files can be inspected, e.g., for debugging.

• In exams2pdf() the control argument was extended to encompass a new cloze.collapse option to fine tune the display of mchoice/schoice alternatives within a cloze subexercise. By default the separator is " / " for collapsing the choice alternatives. Alternatively, for example, it could be set to "\\\\" to add line breaks between the alternatives. Finally, control = list(cloze.collapse = "enumerate") uses a nested enumerate environment.

• nops_scan() now uses the dir argument not only for the output ZIP file but also for the input PDF/PNG image files.

• exams2pdf() and hence also exams2nops() now try to iconv() the header information to the specified encoding (if any) rather than relying on header information (such as institution name etc.) are specified in LaTeX.

exams 2.2-1

• Added new interface exams2pandoc() which can generate a wide variety of output formats via pandoc. The main purpose is to generate Docx output files (or ODT). The output format can be controlled through a template in either LaTeX, HTML, or Markdown format.

• New function stresstest_exercise() for “stress testing” of exercises, i.e., rerunning the exercise many times and capturing how the outcome depends on the simulated input parameters.

• New (and still somewhat experimental) function match_exams_call() that can be employed to query which exams2xyz() function was called to create a certain exercise/exam. Only works from R 3.2.0 onwards.

• Bug fix in read_exercise() for the case when exshuffle is integer. This was not correctly reflected in metainfo$length.

• Avoid

  formatting in questionlist/solutionlist when using converter = "pandoc" in the conversion to HTML.

• Formatting of exercises without “solution” section improved in exams2html() and exams2moodle().

• In exams2qti12() the case of no answer was not handled correctly if partial = FALSE, negative = ... was used. No answer was handled as incorrect (= negative points) rather than neutral (= zero points) but has been fixed now.

exams 2.2-0

• Added first release version of exams2blackboard(). This is essentially based on exams2qti12() but incorporates Blackboard’s own flavor of QTI 1.2. It is still likely to change due to improvements in future versions. After uploading a test into Blackboard the material will appear under “Course Tools”: The test will be available in “Tests” and each pool within the test will also appear in “Pools”.

• Added a new convenience function include_supplement() which facilitates including static supplement files (e.g., graphics or datasets). This essentially just calls file.copy() but facilitates finding supplement files that are available along with the Rnw/Rmd exercise files.

• xweave() gained an extra argument svg = FALSE to optionally produce scalable vector graphics (SVG) instead of PNG for later rendering into HTML. All HTML-based exams2xyz() functions gained an svg = FALSE argument that can be set to TRUE to produce SVG instead of PNG. Base64 encoding is also used for SVG graphics by default.

• xweave() gained an argument engine = NULL that can optionally be set to engine = "knitr" to enable processing Rnw exercises by knitr::knit() instead of the default utils::Sweave().

• exams2nops() now supports registration IDs with more than 7 digits. Up to now, 7 digits were hard-coded but now values of 8, 9, or 10 are also possible by setting the argument reglength in exams2nops() accordingly.

• In exams2nops() the argument blank can now be a vector of length 2 with the number of blank pages before and after the extra “pages”.

• Added arguments samepage = FALSE and twocolumn = FALSE in exams2nops(). If set to TRUE, samepage adds a {samepage} environment around the question and solution lists in order to prevent page breaks within these lists. And the twocolumn option, if set to TRUE, is added in the \documentclass so that the exam is displayed in two-column format.

• New language support in exams2nops(): Hungarian (hu, contributed by Gergely Daroczi and Denes Toth), Finnish (fi, contributed by Klaus Nordhausen). Improvements in: Portugese (pt, contributed by Mauricio Calvao).

• Improvements and bug fixes in exams2tcexam(). Various HTML tags are now supported in the development version by adding a new [html] tag in TCExam. This has been integrated into UIBK’s version of TCExam but is not in the official release yet.

• Fixed a bug in exams2html() with option solution = FALSE or question = FALSE. Now these correctly suppress the corresponding element of the exercise. In previous versions only the header had been set to NA erroneously.

• exams2moodle() can now optionally turn “string” exercises in “essay” quiz items rather than the default “shortanswer”. Various customization options can be set the exextra metainformation. The most important options are illustrated in the new “essayreg” exercise.

• \exshuffle{} can now also be used in read_exercise() for subsampling rather than permutations only, e.g., via . This first permutes the alternatives, always uses the first permuted true (if any), the first permuted false (if any), and then the first remaining alternatives. This facilitates static schoice/mchoice exercises which have many alternatives but should only use a limited number (say 5 for exams2nops()) in each random replication.

• Bug fix in extract_extra() which prevented exextra metainformation from being read correctly in the previous version.

• Improvement in xexams() to better support using the same exercise template several times within the same exam (e.g., for generating a single PDF with multiple versions of the same exercise). The temporary file names employed are now run through make.unique() first.

• Improvement in exams2pdf() to assure that duplication in file names for graphics (across exercises within the same exam) are handled correctly.

• Within several exams2xyz() functions gsub(...) calls were changed to gsub(..., fixed = TRUE) for replacing placeholders that potentially have slashes.

• Updated exams2arsnova() to assure that \( ... \) instead of $ ... $ is used for inline math. Also the JSON output was augmented with (almost empty) “publicPool” information to keep current ARSnova versions happy.

• New exercises “deriv”/“deriv2” (both in Rnw and Rmd) that illustrate a simple question about derivatives to be solved by the product rule. The “deriv” exercise is in num format and “deriv2” is the same in schoice (suggested by Martin Obradovits).

• The tth/ttm-based HTML conversion now makes sure that empty question/solution/list elements remain empty and do not introduce line breaks.

• Added copies of num_to_schoice(), num_to_tol(), … called num2schoice(), and num2tol(), …

exams 2.1-0

• Exercises can now either be in Rnw format (R/LaTeX, as in previous versions) or in Rmd format (R/Markdown). A new function xweave() is provided for weaving either format by either calling utils::Sweave() for Rnw and knitr::knit() for Rmd. If Rmd exercises are used, the weaved exercises require conversion by pandoc (see below).

• The vignettes have not yet been updated to incorporate the R/Markdown information or the new interfaces described below. For examples and some introductory comments, exams_skeleton() can generate demo scripts.

• Added new make_exercise_transform_pandoc() transfomer generator, interfacing rmarkdown::pandoc_convert(). This provides an additional option for generating HTML output and additionally enables Markdown output (e.g., for ARSnova, see below).

• Added new interface exams2nops() for generating PDF exams that can be printed, scanned, and automatically evaluated. Accompanying functions nops_scan() (using the png package) and nops_eval() are provided as well. The “nops” exams can be internationalized. So far there is language support for English (en), Dutch (nl, contributed by Niels Smits), French (fr, contributed by Arthur Allignol), German (de), Italian (it, contributed by Domenico Zambella), Portuguese (pt, contributed by Fabian Petutschnig), Romanian (ro, contributed by Cristian Gatu), Spanish (es, contributed by Maria Kogelnik).

• Added new interface exams2arsnova() for exporting exams/quizzes to the interactive audience response system ARSnova (arsnova.eu). This can either create JSON output files (via RJSONIO::toJSON) that need to be manually imported into ARSnova - or the JSON string can directly be imported into an active ARSnova session (via RCurl).

• Added abstention option in schoice/mchoice questions in exams2moodle(). This can also be set directly through an \exabstention{} tag in the corresponding Rnw exercise.

• Added various convenience functions for creating single- or multiple-choice questions from either a single numeric result (num_to_schoice) or from a matrix solution (matrix_to_schoice, matrix_to_mchoice, det_to_schoice).

• Added various convenience functions for formatting numbers within exercises: fmt() for conveniently displaying a certain number of digits, round2() for rounding away from zero, char_with_braces() for adding braces to negative numbers, and a toLatex() method for "matrix" objects.

• tex2image() now also supports format = "svg" via pdfcrop followed by pdf2svg (instead of ImageMagick’s convert).

• Fixed bug in file paths created for “media” supplements in QTI XML formats. File names had an unnecessary trailing slash which lead to unrecognized suffixes in some browsers.

exams 2.0-2

• Added an optional transform = NULL argument in exams2pdf().

• Avoid require(...) calls for suggested packages.

exams 2.0-1

• The default encoding in exams2moodle() is now ensured to be "UTF-8" rather than "utf8" for improved cross-platform compatibility.

• \exshuffle{TRUE} is now also used in read_exercise() so that schoice/mchoice exercises (or schoice/mchoice components in cloze exercises) are shuffled upon reading exercises. This facilitates static schoice/mchoice exercises.

• New cloze type “verbatim” which is not processed further (e.g., to include Moodle control structures).

• Empty questionlists for readily prepared Moodle cloze exercises can now be handled in exams2pdf().

• Functions from non-imported packages (e.g., only suggested) are now always called with package::function to make R-devel checks happy.

• Bug fix in processing of duration in exams2qti12().

exams 2.0-0

• New version accompanying publication of exams version 2 in the Journal of Statistical Software, 58(1), 1-36. See vignette("exams2", package = "exams") for more details.

• License extended from GPL-2 to GPL-2 | GPL-3.

• New exams2qti21() interface for generating QTI 2.1 (rather than QTI 1.2) XML. So far this was only tested with the ONYX Player within OpenOLAT. Currently, some switches do not appear to fully work, yet, at least within ONYX. The function still needs further thorough testing and might be further improved in future versions.

• Added verbose = FALSE option to xexams() and exams2xyz() interfaces. If set to TRUE, progress information on the exam generation is printed.

• The XML output in exams2qti12() sometimes did not yield fully correct QTI 1.2 output. This has been fixed now and test output was validated against the QTI 1.2 DTD.

• Added a new pluginfile = TRUE option in exams2moodle(). By default, supplementary files (graphics, data files, etc.) are now included using Moodle’s Pluginfile mechanism. This may not work with older versions of Moodle (< 2.5) but in newer versions it is better and more robust than using data URIs.

• Added fix_num = TRUE option in exams2qti12() interface. Because OLAT does not display the correct answer of response_num items with tolerances (vargt/varlt), a workaround was added: In addition to the version with tolerances an exact equality is checked (varequal), adding and removing a 0.00001 points. Thus, evaluation of the exams is not affected but the display in OLAT is fixed.

• The {answerlist} in the {solution} environment can now also be omitted (in mchoice, schoice, cloze exercises). It is still recommended to include it but all exams2xyz() interfaces can process exercises correctly that do not provide it.

exams 1.9-6

• Changed tests/encodings.R to use encoding = "Latin-9" (rather than "latin9" which does not work on Solaris, see ?iconv).

exams 1.9-5

• The new function exams_skeleton() helps users to create their first exam. It creates a directory with a demo.R script illustrating the use of the various exams2xyz() interfaces. Subdirectories with copies of all demonstration exercise Rnw files and templates for different output formats (LaTeX, HTML, or XML) are also created.

• Encodings are now explicitly supported by all exams2xyz() interfaces. Essentially, the encoding argument is just passed on to Sweave() and the user has to make sure that the template (for LaTeX, HTML, or XML output) has the appropriate encoding. exams_skeleton() also supports this and especially the encoding UTF-8 is now fully integrated. The encodings ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) or ISO-8859-15 (aka latin9) have also been tested while other encodings may need further touch-ups. Furthermore, the developers recommend to not rely on encodings but to code special characters with their LaTeX commands because these work in all locales on all platforms.

• The new function exams_eval() captures various types of evaluation policies for exams (with/without partial credits for multiple choice, with/without negative points). The resulting functions aid generation of e-learning exams or evaluation of an exam “by hand”.

• If the edir argument is specified in exams2xyz(), then all files in edir and its subdirectories are searched recursively.

• Asymmetric tolerance intervals are not supported in the exams2xyz() interfaces anymore. Instead, vectors of solutions in cloze exercises can have vectors of tolerances.

• The original exam.tex/solution.tex templates have been renamed to oexam.tex/osolution.tex. The function exams() needs to be used with oexam/osolution while exam/solution are now optimized for exams2pdf(). The reason is that the questionnaire command has been changed. For a multiple-choice question with five answers and correct solutions 1 and 4, say, exams() produces while exams2pdf() now uses [ ][ ][X][ ], i.e., with optional instead of required arguments. The latter solution is not restricted to multiple-choice questions with exactly five answers anymore.

exams 1.9-4

• Several functions now use find.package() rather than .find.package() internally (as the latter will be deprecated soon).

exams 1.9-3

• Enforced .tex suffix in LaTeX files used internally by exams2pdf(). The lack of .tex suffixes led to errors on certain Windows systems.

exams 1.9-2

• New demo exercises:
  • confint2.Rnw shows how a confidence interval can be embedded into a cloze question (for all version 2 interfaces).
  • dist.Rnw is a very short and simple example that is intelligible across a wide range of disciplines (not for statistics audiences only).
  • dist2.Rnw is an extension of dist.Rnw that is written as a cloze.
• Questions in exams2moodle() were forced to be

  -formatted, now embedded in normal HTML (without
  tags).

exams 1.9-1

• Supplementary files had not been correctly inferred on Solaris systems. This has been fixed now so that the package behaves the same across different platforms.

• The code underlying the old "exams" vignette now avoids opening PDF viewers.

exams 1.9-0

• Major revision of the exams package, adding flexible support for generation of exams in different formats including PDF, HTML, Moodle XML, and QTI 1.2 (for OLAT). This new version of the exams package (called “version 2”) is described in a new vignette: vignette("exams2", package = "exams")

exams 1.0-4

• Added an {answerlist} environment in the LaTeX templates (inst/tex) so that each

  in the {answerlist} is automatically labeled with (a), (b), (c), …

• Replaced the old {itemize} environments with {answerlist} in anova.Rnw, boxplots.Rnw, relfreq.Rnw, scatterplot.Rnw, ttest.Rnw. (The resulting PDFs do not change.)

exams 1.0-3

• Small improvements in solution string formatting.

exams 1.0-2

• The argument nsamp was added to exams() in order to allow sampling more than one exercise from each element of the argument file.

exams 1.0-1

• The man page of exams() was modified to use suitable markup commands.

• The questions in the ANOVA example were slightly changed to more explicitly indicate which hypothesis is tested. A typo in the vignette was fixed.

exams 1.0-0

• New version accompanying publication in the Journal of Statistical Software. See vignette("exams", package = "exams") for more details.

• New CITATION file pointing to the JSS paper, see citation("exams").

exams 0.9-5

• The possible types of questions were extended to allow also text results. The new type is specified by “string”.

• To specify the allowed tolerance for numeric solutions now different tolerances can be supplied for falling below or exceeding the true value via \extol{lower}{upper}.

• The “discussion” section in the vignette was extended to include several remarks and pointers on strategies for exercise generation.

exams 0.9-0

• First CRAN release version.

• New vignette("exams", package = "exams") that explains how to use the package.

• New set of exercises for illustation in examples and vignette.

exams 0.2-0

• First stable version for internal use at WU Wien.