Re-engineering of multiple-choice exam-form production tools: Cost-effective and quality-assurance approach

Aims: This study aims at designing and implementing an exam-form generation software tool (named ExPro) for multiple-choice-based (MCB) exams. The study is motivated by the fact that student number in Jordanian universities is continuously growing at high rate. This growth is not accompanied by an equivalent growth of educational resources (instructors, labs, ...etc). A result of this situation is having large number of students in class-rooms. Consequently, providing and using online-examining systems could be intractable and expensive. Alternatively, paper-based MCB tests can be used. Methodology: The design and evaluation of ExPro is done by considering a basic set of design principles that are based on a list of identified Functional Requirements (FRs). Deriving those FRs is made possible by developing ExPro using the Iterative and incremental model from software engineering domain. Results: We show that ExPro proves helpful to instructors in preparing multiple-choice tests. Further, ExPro makes archiving previous exams possible and effective to search for in future. The ExPro is available for free over the Internet and has been in use. ExPro users agree upon that ExPro (i) is easy to be learned and used, and (ii) proves to be a cost-effective alternative to online examining systems.