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Experience of Questionmark Perception at Nottingham; Is Maple TA the answer?

CETL-MSOR Conference 2009, Open University (07/09/2009).

Questionmark Perception has been used for several years at Nottingham and the experience has been quite problematic. Questionmark Perception has been used for formative assessment and for summative timed exams in honours mathematics and engineering service teaching over three years and a good amount of expertise has been developed in coping with the problems encountered when using the system. This session will relate the experience of the technical and teaching staff running assessments in Questionmark Perception as a case study to ask whether this software is really suitable for MSOR subjects. A recent development at Nottingham is the opportunity to try Maple TA, initially to replace a legacy system used for small-scale summative assessment in a Foundation year course. Initial thoughts will be given as to whether Maple TA could be more useful to MSOR teaching and whether its use could be expanded into the assessments currently given in Questionmark Perception.

It is hoped that this session will attract people who are using e-assessment systems in their teaching and learning for a useful discussion on the merits of various systems to our community. In recent time I have met several colleagues from other universities using these two systems with mixed results who do not know each other and I think it is important to try to get people together to see how we can identify best practice in this area.