[Phptest-users] Re: reusing questions

[Charlotte Fischer]

Hi, all -

I have been using phptest since August (0.5.9) creating weekly quizzes (hs
programming course). By the end of the semester, I had collected quite a
nice database of questions some of which I wanted to reuse on the final
exam. I'm new to php and mysql, but I managed to convert my database to
0.6.3 and I've learned enough mysql to create review quizzes (randomly
selected questions from the database) and a semester exam.

I'm bothered by the inefficiency in the database with the multiple copies of
questions. I now have 566 questions, including copies, in the database now
and some of the questions are really long (programming code using html with
tables to hold answer choices). Why not have a test_question table that
connects question_id and test_id? Wouldn't that allow one question to be
used in several tests?

It would be nice to have the option of selecting from already created
questions when creating a test.

The hard part about teaching programming is that there is always something
new to learn - I have several students who use php and mysql and I am
learning from them!

Thanks
Charlotte