Dynamic exams

Before you create dynamic exams consider the following:

• Tags need to be set up on all the questions you want to use

• Are sections being used? If so what are the weightings of question of questions / tags in each section

Creating a dynamic exam

Head over to the exams page and create an exam, once you've filled in the details go to the Type selection and select Dynamic as the type of exam you're creating.

Once selected you'll also be asked if this is exam is going to have sections, select the appropriate option, and progress to the source step

🥫 Dynamic Source/s

From the Source part of the exam set up you'll be able to add one or more quizzes to pool your questions from. It's really important that all the questions you want to use are tagged other wise they won't be included in the exams.

Once the source quizzes have been selected you'll be shown a preview of the available number of questions, tags and quizzes. Once you're happy you can finalise the step or go back to the previous step to add additional quizzes

🏷 Creating Filters

Once you have your source quizzes in place you can start to build up the dynmic filter rules that will decide which questions get placed into each attempt. There are two filter rule types to chose from:

• Tag - uses tags on each question

• EMQ group - will let you pick between EMQ groups. When an EMQ group is used in an attempt, all questions associated with that EMQ will appear in the group, and questions will not be shuffled within an EMQ group

Tag filters

Simple tag filter would be to pick for example any 2 questions tagged with xyz

Operators and complexity

Use the AND , OR operators separately or together to add more complexity to your filter rules.

Use the AND operator to select questions that must contain 2 or more of the selected tags. Be careful to pick the right number of questions otherwise selection will fail validation. Below shows the filter rule which will pick any 2 questions which both have mid-20th century and 'Easy' tags

OR Operator

Use the OR operator to select questions with tags that have one tag OR another. Below shows a filter rule that will pick any 2 questions that are tagged with Master Peices or mid-20th century. (Note this means it could be 2 questions both tagged with Master Peices as well as one question with one tag and one with another)

Build complexity

Use the AND OR operators together to build more complex filters. The below example is going to select 2 questions that have have either the Master Pieces or mid-20th century tag but also have to had the Hard tag.

EMQ group filter

The EMQ Group Filter allows you to generate exam variations based on entire EMQ sets rather than individual tagged questions.

• When using tags, you can specify rules like “2 Biology questions” or “3 Chemistry questions,” and Synap will select questions that match.

• When using the EMQ filter, you select a full EMQ group (e.g. The Great Wave off Kanagawa), and all questions within that set are included together, displayed in their original order.

• This means different exam variations can include EMQ groups of different lengths, since one set might contain 2 questions while another contains 4.

This filter is particularly useful when you want to preserve the integrity and flow of multi-part question sets, such as extended matching questions or case studies, without breaking them apart.

✅ Validate

When you've set up the tag generation rules use the validate button in the top right to check your rules make sense. When something does fail validation you'll get an error message with guidance on how to resolve.

Once validated you can move onto the remaining steps for setting up your exam

🍰 Sections in Dynamic Exams

If the exam has sections in it you will need to create tag filters, and set timers and titles for each section. You can optionally add instructions. Remember if you're enable shuffling of sections then you may not want to name your sections numerically as this may not be the order that they appear in for candidates

Enable sections on a dynamic exam to create strict sections in your exam with different tag rules. Each candidate will get the sections in the same order, but different questions based on the rules in each section

Once enabled the section builder will appear, where you can create the section specific tag rules using the same AND OR operators.

You can also add in section specific instructions and timers from here.

Once you've created and validated the sections you can carry on and set the rest of the exam and schedule

🔢 Restrict dynamic variations

Restricting the number of variations generated lets you set the maximum number of possible unique question sets generated for a user groups exams. Note this doesn't remove shuffling options that have been enabled. Setting a maximum variation of 1, means that all users will get the same set of questions, though they may appear in a different order.

Preview Preview Preview

Setting up dynamic exams can get complex, Synap has a preview exam feature to help you know you've got the rules set up correctly.

Once you've set up your Dynamic filters and saved / passed validation. Go to the publish page and you'll be able to preview a generated attempt that uses the filter rules you've created.

Preview as many times as you need, it won't impact any sort of statistics for the exam

Try for yourself

If you'd like to try the dynamic exam above please use the link below to join our universe portal and try it out!

Try Dynamic Exam: https://universe.synap.ac/join/Yldio8IwMHm