No. 2 pencil makers, watch out, Questionmark for Windows is changing the nature of computerized questionnaires, testing, and assessment. Questionmark is best suited for companies or educational institutions that need to ask easily quantifiable questions of large groups of people. Managers administering an em-ployee training program, for example, can save countless hours that otherwise would be spent recording the information manually.

A Three-Part Question

Questionmark for Windows contains three applications that you use to create, administer, and analyze tests: Designer, Presenter, and Reporter. The Designer lets you create test files, which specify the overall presentation of each test and can contain actual questions. You also can create libraries of questions from which you can develop tests automatically. You even can include external links to multi-media applications, such as a video or audio clip, in your test -- which simply can’t be done in most traditional testing methods.

Once you’ve created the test and any related libraries, the people taking the test use the Presenter to view the questions and make their selections. Depending upon how the test was created, employees may have the option to skip questions and go back to them later, review and change their answers, look at the correct answers and see their scores.

The Reporter lets you analyze the results of the test or survey by listing individual scores and providing a summary that includes the minimum, maximum, and average scores, as well as the standard deviation of the percentage scores. If you wish, print a full report that includes each question and the answer given, as well as the scores that person received for the questions. A question analysis report provides statistics about how each question was answered, including the frequency of answers, average score on the question, and so on.

In addition, you can export test results to a dBASE III (.DBF) file, so you can perform additional statistical analysis on the results.

And The Answer Is...

If there’s a compelling reason to buy this product, it’s the Presenter. For the person taking the test, it’s easy to use, and its automatic scoring and reporting features save time for the person administering the test.

The Designer takes some getting used to. For example, you can’t highlight something and choose an option from the Edit menu or press a button such as DELETE. Instead, you must click on the object and press the right mouse button; a submenu containing the options you can apply to that object appears. Then you choose Delete.

The Designer documentation is thorough; you can find the answers to most of your questions in the manual or via online help. Designer is a powerful tool. Not only can you create multiple-choice, true/false, numeric, and text-matching questions, you also can include Hot Spot questions and jumps. Hot Spots can be used to ask a question using graphics. Jumps are used to provide adaptive testing capabilities, meaning you can ask a question or present additional information depending upon an employee’s answer to another question. For example, if an employee answers a complex question incorrectly, the test can jump to a series of simpler questions about the same topic, pro-viding a more precise assessment of the employee’s level of knowledge

Notably absent from the list of question types is the essay question. While computerized self-scoring would certainly be difficult (if not impossible) using that type of question, many surveys and tests include some open-ended questions that require more than one line of text to fully answer. However, you may finds that the advantages of using the question types that are available will offset the inability to include essay questions.

The Bottom Line

If you want a quick way to create tests and tabulate the results for a relatively small group, you may want to look else-where. For a large group, however, Questionmark is the right answer.

by Erin Koffler

Product: Questionmark for Windows
Manufacturer: Questionmark Computing Ltd.
Phone: (800) 863-3950 or (203) 425-2400
Price: $995 single-user; multi-user packs and multi-site delivery licenses also available; educational pricing slightly lower
System Requirements: 386-class PC or higher, Windows 3.1, 4MB RAM recommended
Other Products in Category: None Known
Strengths: Presenter software lets you administer tests anywhere
Tabulates and reports results instantly, saving hours of manual analysis
Weaknesses: Designer doesn’t adhere to all Windows standards

Reprinted from PC TODAY, Copyright © 1995, Peed Corporation.
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