witsmcq

For providing feedback to students using the Wits MCQ card system.

Overview

This program can be run to produce individual feedback for each student for an MCQ test done using the Wits physical card system.

It produces -- a PDF which contains one page per student showing for each student whether they got a question right or wrong -- an Excel spreadsheet showing the marks for the students (you should have this already but you can use discrepancies to check for anomalies or problems)

You do need to know how to use the Terminal on your Mac or other system.

To install

Open up the Terminal

Download the code

git clone https://github.com/shaze/witsmcq

A directory with the code will be created.

You need Python 3.7 or above running, and the following packages

pandas
openpyxl

You can install the packages by typing

pip3 install pandas openpyxl

Running the code

You need to have two files

The file with the individual students' responses. You can ask Wits ICT for this -- ask for the dat file
An Excel spreadsheet with the answers for the individual questions. The spreadsheet should have two columns: Question Number and Answer spelt exactly like this.

In the simplest case, you can run by jusy saying (changing the file names appropriately)

./witsmcq.py responses.dat answers.xlsx

The program will create a file results.pdf with one page per student and results.xlsx with the mark list.

Here's a slighly more complex example. In this case note that the one file name has spaces in it and so we have to put a backslash in before each space to that the computer knows that the space is part of the file name and not separating different file names. Also in this example, we explicitly name the output files ass3-mcq.pdf and _ass3-mcq.xlsx`

witsmcq.py Downloads/ELEN2021-20230405.dat Documents/Assess\ 3\ Answers.xlsx   --output-name ass3-mcq

Other options

Heading at the top of each page

By default, each page in the PDF file starts with "Test Feedback". To change this use --heading

witsmcq.py --heading "Quiz A"  Answers.xlsx   --output-name ass3-mcq

Number of rows and columns

By default the feedback has 25 rows per column and enough columns to fit all your answers in. If you want to change the number of rows use the -num-rows option.

witsmcq.py --heading "Quiz A"  --num-rows 2  Answers.xlsx   --output-name ass3-mcq
witsmcq.py  --num-rows 3  --output-name ass3-mcq  Answers.xlsx
witsmcq.py  --num-rows 5 witsmcq.py   --output-name ass3-mcq