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5 AUTHORING CONTENT IN LON-CAPA
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5.3.4 Importing Testbanks
The following requirements must be met to ensure that you will succeed in building LON-
CAPA problem files from a file containing testbank questions.
1. The uploaded testbank file containing questions and answers must be either plain text,
rich text format (RTF), or a web page (i.e., HTML format). Testbank files in RTF
and HTML formats may contain images. If conversion to LON-CAPA fails for RTF
or HTML formats, re-saving the testbank file from the application originally used to
generate it in plain text, and re-uploadingthe fileto LON-CAPAmaysolvethe problem
(albeit with the loss of formatting information).
2. All questions must occur before any of the answers. Each question should begin on a
new line starting with a number followed immediately by a space, a period, or enclosed
in parentheses, i.e., 1 , 1., (1), 1), or (1 . If you use a word processor to create the
testbank questions you must disable auto-formatting of lists, otherwise the formatting
will not conform to the new line requirement.
3. One or more correct answers need to be provided for all questions (although the answer
text may be blank for essay questions). Each answer should begin on a new line using
the same numbering scheme as used for the questions, and all answers must occur after
all the questions.
4. Multiple choice and multiple answer correct questions should consist of (i) the question
number followed by (ii) a question stem beginning on the same line and (iii) two or
more foils, with each foil beginning on a new line and prefixed by a unique letter, or
Roman numeral, listed in alphabetic or numeric order, beginning at a (alphabetic) or
i(Roman numeral), followed by a period, or enclosed in parentheses, i.e., a., (a), i., or
(i)
5. If fill-in-the-blank or multiple answer questions have more than one correct answer,
each answer should appear in a comma-, tab-, space-, or new line-delimited list. For
aranking/ordering question, the ”answer” should contain the foil identifiers correctly
ordered in a similarly delimited list. If two or more foils have the same ranking,
they should occur together, with an equals sign separating equally ranked foils [e.g.,
(b),(e)=(a),(d),(c)]
5.3.5 Answer Display Overview
Several xml tags are available to provide student guidance during problem display and also
after the answer date. These include <notsolved>, <preduedate>, which are useful when
the students are working a problem, and <solved>, <postanswerdate>, which are helpful
in providing feedback. The content in the xml tag <postanswerdate> is suppressed until
after the answer date.
Answers are typically not displayed to the student when they submit an answer to a
problem, unless their answer is correct. When the problem is assigned in a course, a param-
eter for the ‘answer date’ must be set such that students will see answers displayed when