Quizler Documentation

Life Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Office of Information Technology

Quizler Documentation

Many on-line quizzing applications force you to enter quizzes with each question, answer and response in a separate box in a form, which makes managing the data for a quiz very tedious. In Quizler the entire quiz is described in a single text file, which provides flexibility for managing your data.

Definition of the Quiz Format:

A block of lines ending with a blank line defines a set of:
one question,
several answers for the student to submit,
and optionally, custom responses to be presented to the student when an answer is submitted.
The first line in a block is the question.
The following lines are answers (or responses).
The correct answer is marked by an asterisk (*) at the beginning of the line.
A custom response may optionally follow an answer on the next line.
A custom response is marked by an exclamation point (!) at the beginning of the line.
If no custom response is given, the default responses are Correct, Incorrect and Skipped.
All lines may have spaces or tabs preceeding them so you can indent if you like.
If you'd like to physically break up a long line so that it wraps nicely
on-screen, then ending a physical line with a backslash (\) will allow the
next physical line to be a continuation of the logical line.
Comment lines may be interspersed anywhere.
Comments start with a pound sign (#).
HTML tags can be used for bold, underline, or to include a picture.
Because the double-quote character is part of the HTML language,
you must enter " instead of " when you want to put double-quotes
into a quiz. Or simply use single-quotes instead.
Directive lines control various options.
Place the directive lines at the top of your file, except for $page_break and $text which go inbetween questions.
- $heading=text of heading
  A heading which will appear above the questions in a quiz.
- $pick=10
  will pick 10 questions randomly from the questions in the quiz.
- $repeat_questions
  When using $pick to select random questions, students will be forced to receive a new sampling of questions after submitting their answers. If you\'d like the students to be able to review the same questions before requesting a new sampling, add $repeat_questions to the quiz defintion.
- $questions_per_page=2
  Use $questions_per_page to only show so many questions per page.
- $page_break
  Insert $page_break between questions to set specific page breaks.
- $text
  Text can be inserted between questions to notate different sections of a quiz or whatever purpose you prefer. E.g:
  $text = <h3>A heading to display between Questions 2 and 3</h3>
- $survey
  Quizler can be used to give anonymous surveys. Add $survey to the quiz definition. Logins can be required to access the survey, but the login is not recorded with the responses. After the survey is submitted, the user will see a page thanking them for their participation. Each login is only allowed to take the survey once. Admin accounts can take the survey any number of times, but their responses are not recorded.

Model:

# Question 1
question?
  incorrect answer 1
  incorrect answer 2
  * correct answer
  incorrect answer 3
  incorrect answer 4

# Question 2
#   with custom responses
question?
  incorrect answer 1
    ! custom response 1
  incorrect answer 2
    ! custom response 2
  * correct answer
    ! custom response for correct answer
  incorrect answer 3
    ! custom response 3
  incorrect answer 4
    ! custom response 4

Example:
Alternate shading is used below to show each physical line.




$pick=1


$heading=Students, please complete this quiz by January 29th.



 


#Question 1


Gel electrophoresis was performed on the enzyme peroxidase, obtained from the tissue extracts of a single organism. The resulting bands indicate the presence of two slightly different forms of peroxidase, The LEAST likely explanation for the results is that the:


  Organism has two different allozymes for peroxidase


    ! Incorrect. An allozyme is one or more different versions of an enzyme.


  Organism is heterozygous for peroxidase


    ! Incorrect. An organism having two different allozymes is heterozygous for that trait.


  Organism received alternate versions of the enzyme for each parent


    ! Incorrect. It stands to reason that that an organism that is heterozygous for the peroxidase enzyme received one version from one parent and the other version from the other parent.


  Locus for peroxidase is polymorphic


    ! Incorrect. Polymorphism means that more than one allele exists for a given trait.


  * Gene for peroxidase is pleiotrophic


    ! Correct. Pleiotrophic genes exert an effect on more that one trait. This is  not indicated by the results of the electrophoresis. Only one trait is under consideration here  the trait for the enzyme peroxidase.


 

# Question 2


This figure shows the trend in relative sizes of brown cave bears (as measured \


by molar size) in comparison to glacial cycles. The trend is consistent \


with which of the following? \


<img src="/quizler/test/molars.gif">


  Kurten's rule


    ! Incorrect. Kurten is the paleontologist who studied the sizes of cave bears in relation to glacial cycles.


  Allen's rule


    ! Incorrect. In Allen's rule, extensions of the body such as limbs are abbreviated in organisms in colder climates and extended and thinner in organisms of warmer climates.


  * Bergmann's rule


    ! Right! Bergmann's rule holds that animals living in colder climates are larger and animals living in warmer climates are smaller. There is a graded decline in body size as you move from colder to warmer climates.


  Hardy Weinberg equilibrium


    ! Incorrect. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium means that under a set of specific conditions, the frequency of alleles in a population's gene pool remains constant.


  Davidson-Danielli theory


    ! Incorrect. The Davidson-Danielli theory refers to the plasma cell membrane

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