Multi-version assessments

Plom is designed for giving multi-version assessments suitable for crowded classrooms and multiple sittings.

You provide several versions of your assessment, and Plom interleaves questions from each version to create a large number distinct assessments.

Plom produces a different PDF file for each student by “slicing-and-dicing” your input “sources”.

Restrictions

For this interleaving to be possible, and for scoring to be practical, different versions of a question must take the occupy the same page(s) and must be worth the same number of points.

Loosening these restrictions is probably possible in theory, but none of the built-in tooling will help you do this.

Any questions that share a page must be the same version (this will happen automatically if you let Plom create the version mapping).

The question-version mapping

Tip

The first time you use Plom, we recommend using just a single version of your assessment (and skipping this section!)

When creating a multi-versioned assessment, a critically-important step is the creation of the “QV map” or the “question-version mapping”, which tells Plom what versions to expect for each question and for each paper.

You can have Plom create this mapping automatically, or specify your own via a spreadsheet if you have additional requirements.

Caution

Its a good idea to download and backup a copy of your QV-map. If something goes catastrophically wrong, it (and the specification) are crucial components to recreate your assessment elsewhere.

Multiversioning FAQs

I want to use different versions of my ID page

For example, maybe you want to interleave versions 1 and 2 for section 101 and version 3 for section 102. In this case you might want to write “Section 101” on the front (ID) page of papers numbered 1-199 and “Section 102” on papers 200-350. This can be done by adding a id.version column to your custom “QV map” .csv file.

Danger

Versioned ID-pages is a new feature, without much (any?) real-world testing. Use at your own risk. If you’ve tested it, please get in touch so we can remove this message following your act of bravery.

Can I create my own per-student PDFs and use multiversioning?

Yes. You need only provide Plom with your chosen question-version map.