Step #3 of assessment creation is the assignment of questions to groups. Test Pilot will present any question in an enabled group. By default, when creating a new assessment, a default group is created and all new questions are added to that group as they are created. Thus, if you want all of your questions to appear on the assessment web page generated by Test Pilot, you need to do nothing in step #3. It's already done for you.

However, Test Pilot provide some powerful options in step #3. You can do ALL of the following since you may make as many groups as you wish and questions may belong to multiple groups. Only enabled groups actually appear on a generated assessment. That you can have active and inactive groups, turning them on and off as you see fit.

• organize your questions into logical groups (e.g. geometry vs. algebra questions)
  
  
• organize your questions into functional groups (e.g. practice questions vs. test questions)
  
  
• organize your questions into assignments (e.g. week one questions vs. week two questions)
  
  
• have Test Pilot make a random selection of N questions from a pool (e.g. show 5 trigonometry questions and 4 algebraic questions)
  
  
• keep track of participant scores to particular types of questions. Since Test Pilot calculates group score regardless of whether the group is enabled or not, you could, for example, track the general performance of a class on trigonometry questions even though your assessment may include questions from many groups. This unique capability of Test Pilot is particularly well suited to the analysis of standardized test question responses

Selecting and Ordering Questions

Test Pilot Classic is being continually improved. As a part of that process we have added an improved editing interface for maintaining question groups. For versions of Test Pilot Classic v3.2 and above, this improved editing interface is described on the following page. For versions of Test Pilot Classic prior to v3.2, the older editing interface is described here. We encourage all v3 owners to download the free upgrade to v3.2 and above in order to take advantage of the newer, improved editing interface.

Reordering Questions in the Editor

You may choose to reorder the questions in your database. The order shown is the order used when assessment evaluations are presented to participants. This provides a consistent format when assessments are randomly generated. However, there is an important consideration. Test Pilot uses each question's unique id in participant responses in order to associate a response with a question. If a question's id is altered, then the relationship between a participant's response and to question to which the response belongs is broken. Therefore, if you choose to reorder your questions, Test Pilot must erase all previously stored responses in order to prevent data integrity problems. Since, reordering is typically done in the test creation process, this restriction is usually not an issue.

The Reorder process only affects the order in which the questions are listed when editing questions. It does not affect the order in which the questions are presented to the user.

To alter the presentation order, you need to modify the order in which questions are entered into individual question groups as described above in Selecting and Ordering Questions.

The choice for reordering questions is presented on the question grouping page in the following manner. Clicking upon the Reorder Question button will present the author with the question reordering display.