

Terascore (YC W13) launches to help teachers bring testing online - takacsv
http://blog.ycombinator.com/terascore-yc-w13-launches-to-help-teachers-bring-testing-online

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ivan_ah
I like the idea and there is a real need for this kind of app, but I think
that restricting to multiple choice and text input questions is a very bad
choice. These types of questions are the legacy of computer-fill-in-the-
circle-with-a-pencil technology from the old days.

The khan academy exercises framework[1] is doing some very interesting things
on the "rich question" front. They have questions which can be answered by
moving lines, matching expressions as well as entering rich math expressions
sqrt(2).

There is also ka-lite[2] which is building a "hosted khan-exercises"
application, which includes a basic "teacher admin" view. It would be worth
taking a look at it -- it is a very well done django app.

More feedback when the demo starts working again :)

_________

[1] <https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises> [2]
<https://github.com/jamalex/ka-lite/>

~~~
balazs
Terascore co-founder here. We totally agree with you on rich question types.
We needed to start somewhere, but we do plan to add for example "alter the
graph to set the correct answer" question type. The challenge with things like
that is providing an easy-to-use question authoring feature, that is available
to all teachers using our product. Our focus is enabling _all_ educators to
build tests of all kinds, so that's quite unlike Khan Academy (whom we admire
greatly though).

BTW, essay questions are not at all "fill-in-the-circle" and with keyword-
driven automated scoring recommendations (available in Terascore) we are
making teachers lives easier.

p.s. demo.terascore.com is up and has not been down. Please email us at info
at terascore.com if you experience any issues. Thanks!

~~~
ivan_ah
Hi balazs,

> demo.terascore.com is up and has not been down

Last time I went some assets were not loading -- it could have been a problem
on my side. Now it works great.

more feedback:

The contenteditable work is very nice. I see what you mean by "enabling _all_
educators": WYSIWYG definitely makes a difference here.

The tooltips that pupup all over the place are annoying. OK, for reproducing
MSWord-like editing in the browser but don't reproduce the paper clip!

The recourse to tooltips sounds to me like you are having trouble phrasing the
key value proposition. You should think of your MVP and just //show it//
without too much explaining. The "what you do" steps should be obvious from
the visual hierarch of the website.

I would suggest the following changes. At Top Level s/Tests/My tests/ and
s/Students/My students/ as for Educators, it doesn't seem like it belongs at
the top level. Your users mostly be coming to create exams and check their
students' grades.

On the exam admin view, say
[https://demo.terascore.com/assessment/cc54852a50a54a499e8333...](https://demo.terascore.com/assessment/cc54852a50a54a499e833377e77f5fc7/content)
, there should be more visual demaraction for each question. The exam is a
list of questions. Make that visible in the hierarchy. One approach would be
to have a list of the questions on the left (like a table of contents) and
move all the question authoring stuff out of there. Maybe you could have the
authoring toolbar that appears on the right of the question currently being
edited. Such a "right margin panel" could also contain all the questions
metadata instead of that cramped row Type|*|POINTS|TAGS.

Ok now I should probably go and get some work done but I just wanted to say
that you have built an excellent tool and I like where you are going with
this, EXCEPT the part where you assign the student's grade based on the
z-score. That is BS and you know it. What information does my ranking relative
to the other students in my class convey?

I encourage you to focus more on the "Reporting: Immediate self-assessment,
Students can access their own score reports" aspect of this and then come up
with a effort based metric for the "Grades in Score Report ADJUST GRADING"
part. Forget µ and σ, instead you could report "cpu usage" during the last
(week, month, year). I wrote some more about this not too long ago
<http://minireference.com/blog/exams-suck/>

