Accessing Assessments

Back - Administration Up - Test Pilot v3

Whether you use Test Pilot's online authoring environment or the Test Pilot standalone authoring database to create your assessment or survey, you'll have created a Test Pilot .tp3 file in a directory on your web server. Consider the following typical web server file tree:

There are two documents that appear to have been exported from a Test Pilot database and copies to this server: test1.tp3 and mytest.tp3. They may be accessed from the server server.edu using the following URL's:

• http://server.edu/test1.tp3
  
  
• http://server.edu/math101/mytest.tp3

If your server attempts to send the contents of file to you rather than producing a login dialog or an assessment or survey, then your server is not configured correctly. Contact your server administrator and point them to the following web page for help with installation and configuration: Click here...

Typically these URL's would be entered as links on a web page so the participant would not need to type in a long URL.

Note that the file mytest.tp3 is accompanied by a mytest.tpj directory. This is a directory automatically created by Test Pilot which is used to store all of your participants' responses. There also appear to be two accompanying graphics files which may be associated with questions in the assessment: picture1.gif and picture2.jpg.

Accessing either of these URL's should result in a Test Pilot login screen as shown below:

The participant may enter an authorized id in the user id box and hit return or click on the Request button to access the assessment.

Bypassing the Login Dialog

You may compose a URL that includes a particular authorized user id. Suppose you wanted to access an assessment named courseEvaluation.tp3 located in your server's math101 directory with an predefined user id of springsemester. The form of such a URL is as follows:

http://server.edu/math101/courseEvaluation.tp3?USER_ID=springsemester

Please note that USER_ID is case sensitive and there is an underscore character between USER and ID. The underscore character is typially located on the keyboard as a shifted minus key.

The assessment's administrator can also designate the document as an anonymous assessment to bypass the login dialog so the assessment itself would be immediately displayed upon accessing the URL. It is also possible to designate an assessment as anonymous, yet still require the entry of an authorized user id to control access. However, once admitted to such an anonymous assessment, the participant's responses are, in no way, connected to the id used for admittance to guarantee anonymity.