Possible meta-informations in R/exams

eusebe 0
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I discover the very useful R/exams package, as well as its very complete documentation.

Unless I'm mistaken, I didn't find a place providing an exhaustive list of meta-informations that can be included at the end of a Rmd question. I'm particularly interested in the meta-informations in the context of a moodle export. I know that it is possible to define a section or a sub-section, or to request the upload of a document, for example. But what are all the other possibilities?

Thank you very much!

r-exams moodle
2 Answers

You can see a list in ?read_metainfo or in the documentation, read_exercise:

read_metainfo returns a list with the following elements

uzsolt0
Tag Description
extype Specification of the type of exercise (required): num for questions with a numeric answer, mchoice for questions with multiple-choice answers, schoice for questions with single-choice answers (i.e., multiple-choice with exactly one correct solution), string for questions with a text answer, or cloze (i.e., combinations of the above).
exname Short name/description (to be used for printing within R).
extitle Pretty longer title (for Moodle).
exsection Section of the exercise (for Moodle, with slashes for subsections as in a URL).
exversion Version of the exercise.
exsolution Correct solution (required). It must contain a numeric solution for num, a string of zeros/ones for mchoice/schoice, or a character string of string. For cloze a combination of these can be specified, e.g., exsolution: 1.23|001|glm.
extol Tolerance for num solutions or a vector of tolerances (expanded if necessary) for cloze solutions. If unspecified the tolerance is 0.
exclozetype List of types for the elements of a cloze exercise, e.g., exclozetype: num|schoice|string for the example above.
exstringtype Type(s) of answer format for string exercises. The default is string but can also be essay (text editor) and/or file (upload menu).
expoints Points for (fully) correct solution. Default is 1.
exshuffle Logical or numeric indicating if/how to shuffle schoice/mchoice answers.
exmaxchars Maximum number of characters in string answers (for QTI).
exextra[] Additional metainformation to be read and stored, e.g., for new custom interfaces. The default storage type is character, e.g., exextra[myinfo]: 1.23 yields a metainformation element myinfo of "1.23". The type can also be numeric or logical, e.g., exextra[myinfo,logical]: FALSE|FALSE|TRUE.

Notes:

  • You are right that this is not easy to find. It is shown in Table 2 of the vignette("exams2", package = "exams") (also published in the Journal of Statistical Software). I plan to write a blog post about it when version 2.4-0 is finally released to CRAN.
  • The table above also includes a couple of newer tags, added after the journal publication.
  • In exextra you can include any custom information you wish, e.g., for storing meta-information you need for a custom exams2xyz() interface or for evaluating results.
  • In exams2moodle() we support a couple of Moodle-specific exextra options, namely some detailed formatting of "essay" type questions. All supported options can be found in the essayreg exercise template.
  • Additionally, it's possible to set the numwidth and stringwidth arguments from ?exams2moodle also via exextra options. See the fourfold2 exercise template for a worked example.
Achim Zeileis0
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