This page shows examples of ExamOnline question types. Click on an image to view a larger version.
Extended answer / essay questions
ExamOnline has unique support for essay type questions. Candidates enter their essay using an intuitive and familiar word processor interface, which supports formatting and cut and paste. Candidate answers are automatically saved every 20 seconds or so. The system is tolerant to network and server failures, automatically re-synchronising when the network / server are restored, without the candidate being aware of any problem. And ExamOnline includes an efficient human marking interface, allowing markers to annotate candidate answers with comments / feedback, and providing significant efficiency savings over paper based marking. Alternatively, candidate essays can be printed out for marking on paper. Hand-drawn sketches can also be submitted as part of a candidates response to an essay style question – click on the menu on the left for more information about support for essays and hand-drawn sketches.
Multiple choice / multiple selection questions
ExamOnline supports several variants of the traditional multiple choice question. As well as straightforward multiple choice, for multiple selection questions you can choose whether all parts must be correct to get the marks or whether marks are awarded for each correct selection, and you can choose whether or not to limit the number of selections candidates can make.
Best-worst questions
Best-worst questions are a distinctive variant on multiple choice questions which are useful to penalise wrong answers as well as crediting correct answers.
Numeric questions
With numeric questions you can specify simple answers (e.g. the answer must be 5) or more complex ranges (e.g. the answer must be between 1 and 2).
Gap-fill questions
With gap-fill questions, you basically list the answers you would accept as correct. However ExamOnline provides powerful marking options that make marking considerably more robust (i.e. both accurate and flexible) than would otherwise be the case. These include automatic spelling correction, case sensitivity, and word order. You can also specify “invalid” answers e.g. you can specify that “right atrium” gets 2 marks, “atrium” get 1 mark, but “left atrium” gets no marks (even though it contains the word “atrium”). Finally, if you are feeling brave you can mark gap-fill answers using regular expressions.
Multiple gap-fill questions
A multiple gap-fill question allows you to include multiple gap-fill text boxes in a single question, and you may optionally include a background image.
Matching questions
Matching questions can be used to ask the candidate to match a set of answers against a set of labels or questions
Ranking questions
Ranking questions are similar to matching questions, but candidates have to select a rank for each label or question.
