News & Events: New Features for Winter 2010

Release scheduled for Sunday-Tuesday, December 27-29, 2009 

Our new feature release is scheduled for 5 AM Sunday, 12/27, through 7 AM Tuesday, 12/29 (10 AM 27 December to 12 noon 29 December, GMT). Please do not schedule tests during the release downtime as MyMathTest programs will be temporarily unavailable.

New Features

Automatic Placement of Students Based on Cut Scores
Placement program coordinators or instructors can set a minimum score (or a range) for placement tests that students must meet in order to be placed into specific courses. Program coordinators can also choose whether to show students their placement results on the site, and if so, to use a built-in email template to notify students of their results.

Continuous Testing Experience
Program coordinators or instructors who require students to take multiple placement tests can now create a group of tests linked by prerequisite scores that will be delivered to students in one continuous test experience. Assuming students satisfy the prerequisite score for the next test in a group, they will be prompted to continue immediately after they submit the current test. If they don�t meet the prerequisite score, placement will be calculated using the results of the just-completed test. Watch a tour of this feature

Item Analysis for Pooled Tests
On tests that use pooled questions, instructors now have item-level student performance statistics. This will allow them to analyze how the class and individual students performed by test question and objective and also gauge the relative difficulty of questions from the same pool.

Rolled-up Coordinator Program Exports
Coordinator program instructors can choose to generate Advanced Exports of student results for all Member programs to which they have access in one csv file. This file also contains summary information of student performance across the entire program group. The option to export member program results in a zip archive of separate csv files is still available.

Ability to Hide the Study Plan
Instructors who do not use the Study Plan in their program now have the option of hiding it completely (the button is not shown). Other instructors may choose to hide the Study Plan until after students have taken a test; both options can be found on the Select Coverage page in the Study Plan Manager.

Ability to Hide Test Score and/or Question Results
A new "Results Display" section on the assignment Settings page lets instructors choose whether to show students their test scores and question results (the current display), show test scores only, or show neither. In the last case, students see their Results page immediately after submitting a test or quiz, where dashes appear in the column where scores would normally be.

Faster Access to Edit Publisher-provided Questions
From the Preview & Add or Remove window, instructors can click the new "Copy and Edit" button to bring up the Exercise Builder with the question already in place.

Answer Tolerance for Numeric Answers
The option for instructors to specify their own tolerance range (decimal or percentage) for accepting numeric answers, which was introduced this summer for statistics titles, is now available for all titles.

Support for Screen-readers in Multiple-choice Questions
The MathXL Player now supports the ability for students to use JAWS or other Flash-compatible screen readers to read the text and navigational features of multiple choice questions.