Creating a Database for Test Items in National Examinations

Abstract

This paper looks at how to generate questions for national and local
examinations without putting such questions (Items) at risk of leakage;
reduce cost and time taken for such activities like time consuming items
analysis and moderation; and improve on the poor selection which often
characterized manually generated questions. These problems raise doubt on
the credibility of examinations and the innocent students who use such
certificates are at the receiving end. The fundamental focus in this piece, is
on how to use Database Management System (DBMS) to store questions
produced during ‘Items Generation’ for easy selection of questions, good
discrimination index, high security provision, good item-difficulty
stratification, easy item analysis, a good retrieval system, specification for
hardware requirement and software acquisition options.