The controls on this page are convenience settings to save steps in the authoring of questions for the assessment. They permit the author to make choices that apply to new questions as they are created. You can change these settings at any time the need arises. For example, you could set the default question type to multiple choice and then create all of your assessment's multiple choice questions. Then, you could change the default question type to essay and then enter all of your assessment's essay questions.

All of these settings can be overridden when editing an individual question; they simply define the state of certain feature controls at the time a new question is created.

Default Question Type - selects the type of question that by default is selected when creating a new question. Using this saves a step in selecting a question type when creating a new question.

Default Group - selects the default question group that a question is assigned to when the question is created. Groups are defined in step #3, choosing questions. This control is particularly useful in helping your to categorize questions. You could skip ahead to step #3 and create a number of question categories. Then, with appropriate settings of this value, you could enter all questions for each category in order. This could save multiple steps in categorizing the questions after authoring.

Indentation - questions may be indented for grouping purposes. This control saves a step by selecting the default setting for the indentation checkbox of newly created questions.

Choice Presentation - multiple choice, yes/no and true false question choices may be presented as a popup menu or a set of radio buttons (where all choices are shown). This control selects the default setting for the option when creating one of those types of questions.

Storage - When participant responses are reported, you may choose to have their actual choice presented or an ordinal number or letter representing their choice recorded. A downloaded report of participant responses in these forms permits easy export to external programs such as a sophisticated statistical analysis program. For multiple choice questions, these ordinal choices could be 1, 2, 3, etc. or a, b, c, etc. For true/false and yes/no questions these ordinal choices could be 0 or 1 or a or b, with b representing no or false. This option has no effect upon other types of questions.

Mathematical - Test Pilot can align a column of figures placing an operator beside the column and a dark line below the column when generating a question for participants. This control makes mathematical formatting the default selection for newly created questions. This is especially useful for entering large amounts of mathematical questions for K-12 level math tests and tutorials.

Media Placement - Multimedia items (pictures, sound, video, etc.) may be associated with any question. This control selects the default location relative to the questions text for presenting the media on the assessment's web page.

Media Player Size - For video and audio media, you may need to control the size of the area on the web page that is used to embed the media player. These controls set the default size for that area in newly created questions.

Essay Box Size - when offering an essay question, Test Pilot creates a text entry box where the participant types their response. They are NEVER limited as to how much text can be typed but you may specify a default size for the box provided. If they exceed the size of the box, scroll bars on the box will automatically become active permitting them to enter and edit their response.

---