This page contains list of releases and changes for the Practique Server software.

4.1.11 - 22nd March 2016

New features

Added settings to have different number of decimal places on the Candidate Feedback Report

Since 4.1.10 all mark related indicators are displayed with 2 decimal place precision through out the system. This changes allows to generate Candidate Feedback Report with different number of decimal place then it's set globally for the system.

4.1.10 - 15th March 2016

Fixes

PRAC-871, PSD-180, PSD-178: Fix inconsistent pass/fail calculation due to rounding of the cut score

Issue
Practique Pass/Fail calculation for Candidates has been affected by inconsistent comparisons of rounded exam pass mark with not rounded Candidate score. This inconsistency may result in false Passes for Candidates whose score was very close to the rounded exam pass mark.

Example
Assume Exam pass mark (not rounded) is 32.23 then rounded value is 32 (mathematically rounded down) and Candidate score of 32.11.
When Practique calculate the Pass/Fail for above Candidate comparison is made using following expression “Pass when candidate_score >= rounded_exam_pass_mark (32.11 >= 32) otherwise Fail” which would indicate Candidate Pass despite he should have Failed because non rounded comparison of the values is 32.11 >= 32.23 indicating Fail instead of Pass.

Changes & Resolution
Changes have been made to calculations for Candidate Pass/Fail so that non rounded values are always used for comparison. This ensures that Candidate Pass/Fail will be calculated accurately.

It would be impractical to display raw values (precision of 16 decimal places) for mark related values (pass mark, mean score, etc…) on screens such as Standard Settings and others. Therefore Practique now consistently displays these values mathematically rounded to two decimal places throughout the system. Keep in mind that the rounding of the values is solely for the purpose of display.

False positives/negatives
While the calculation of the Pass/Fail is now accurate there can still be confusion when checking the results due to the fact that in very rare occasion two students with the same score (will be displayed rounded with 2 decimal places precision) will have different Pass/Fail which is due to the rounding of the values for display, Pass/Fail is accurate.

This would happen for example in case of scores 32.112342 (A) and 32.114234 (B) with exam pass mark of 32.113123. In this case student A would Fail with displayed score of 32.11 and student B would Pass with score 32.11.

The chance of this happening are very slim as the difference in score vs rounded score is at this level of precision negligible.

List of Screens and Reports affected by changes described above

Screen changes

• • Set standard page 
    • Pass score
    • Download as CSV
  • Set standard - Candidates)
    • Score
    • Max score
  • View sessions - Candidates
    • Score
    • Max score
  • Set standard - Items - View marks 
    • Score
  • Set standard - Examiners
    • Mean score
  • Examiners - View (Examiner detail)
    • Total score

Report changes
Candidate feedback report:

• • Changed format of percentage values
  • Accurate Pass/Fail

Exam analysis report:

• • Changed format of percentage values
  • Minimum score
  • Maximum score
  • Median
  • Mode
  • Mean
  • Standard error of mean
  • Standard deviation
  • Cut score
  • Pass Score rounded
  • Cut Scores & SEM
    • Number formatting
    • Accurate Pass/Fail

Station cut score report:

• • Mean score
  • Cut score
  • Max score
  • Standard deviation

4.1.9 - 10th March 2016

New features

PRAC-878: Practique Server Status page

Status page provides means for IT services to monitor Practique Server status and status of it's sub services. Status page can be provided in various formats so that integration with different types of monitoring tools is possible. For full documentation please see Practique Server Monitoring.

Fixes

PRAC-887, PSD-199 & PRAC-878: Monitoring & Recovery of the Database server and iPad communication

Under certain circumstances (server restart, maintenance, etc...) it was possible that the underlying Practique Server Database connection has been lost while status indicator for WSI (top right corner of the screen) still indicated fully working state. This caused issue with communication between iPad and Server. Manifestation of the issue was that iPad indicated that it is waiting for Server to respond but it never received the response.

We have improved monitoring and auto-recovery for the Database server within Practique so that the WSI indicator does provide accurate information. Also we have incorporated auto-recovery in case that the problem with the database is temporary.

The same status indication is now provided by the Practique Server Status page.

PRAC-877: Written, Student logins for Practique for iPad has been truncated when containing both numbers and letters

Certain format of Candidate IDs has been transformed unexpectedly by Practique which caused problems for Candidates to log-in into Practique for iPad application. For example when Candidate has been imported with ID of 'XY1230Z' Practique would schedule such Candidate into the exam with iPad password of '1230' which would be unexpected.

This has now been fixed and Practique always uses Candidate ID field as iPad password, so 'XY1230Z' from above example.

Security

PRAC-890: Clickjacking protection enabled

We have enabled security feature for the application server protecting it from the Clickjacking attacks. Protection adds X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN HTTP header to the server response which can be used by supported browsers.

For more information about Clickjacking please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking. For more information about implementation see documentation.

4.1.8 - 19th February 2016

Fixes

PRAC-843, PSD-176: OSCE, Candidate Feedback Reports did not reflect correctly pass/fail for the candidate under certain conditions

When exam results has been processed and Minimum items to pass settings has been set to value other then 0 on the Set Standard screen then Candidate Feedback Reports have been generated with false Pass for the Candidates who had been failed due to the Minimum items to pass settings. Results on the Set Standard & statistics for an exam have always been calculated correctly.

Candidate Feedback Report generator has been fixed to accurately reflect settings from the Set Standard screen.

 PRAC-863: OSCE, Options to customise Candidate Feedback Reports were not taken into account when generating the report

This issue only applies to reports generated for OSCE exams. Candidate Feedback Report provides customisation options to show or hide various information such as:

• • Include item breakdown
  • Include cohort average
  • Include number of questions
  • Include class average
  • Include questions overall

Unfortunately all options in italic have been ignored by the report generator and produced the same results regardless of the user selected settings. This is now fixed and report customisation works as expected.

4.1.7 - 26th January 2016

Fixes

PSD-112: Problems importing SBA questions using CSV and XLSX formats

• Unable to import CSV file on MS Windows platform
• Unable to import CSV/XLSX file when it contained multiple columns with the same Dimension
• Unable to import XLSX file when it contained empty rows (included in 4.1.4)

It is now possible to import CSV files on MS Windows platform without problems as well as XLSX files (correct format assumed).
Described problems here are connected to certain MS Windows platform and CSV/XLSX files with not entirely correct format.

4.1.6 - 26th January 2016

Fixes

PSD-130: OSCE Reporting: Station Cut Score graph has been improved:

• Cut score line is now rendered from the edge to edge of the graph
• Cut score value is displayed above the cut score line
• Borderline marker has been indicated in different colour from the Cut score line

PSD-83,PSD-143: OSCE: Edit mark screen has been improved in order to accomodate for longer examiner text feedback.

It is now possible to comfortably review the text feedback provided by examiners. Also the height of the text boxes is set to fit the text to minimise scrolling and put all content on screen.

4.1.5 - 20th January 2016

Fixes

PSD-170, PSD-152: Additional fix for the Special characters issue.

Previous fix introduced in 4.1.4 didn't solve the issue with special characters completely and throughout the system.

4.1.4 - 17th January 2016

Fixes

PSD-170, PSD-152: Inputing special characters such as Emoji, Currency symbols and other special characters result in Marksheet rejection by the Server and synchronisation errors on the iPads.

Changes has been made to the Marksheet processing on the Server to correctly accept input from iPads including special characters.

PSD-129: Fixed display of missing “Passing criteria” statement on the OSCE Candidate feedback report.

PSD-112: Fixed import of the Written exam SBA Items using Microsoft Excel (XLSX) format

It was not possible to import XLXS files if any of the columns in the source XLSX file were empty or the XLSX  file contained empty rows. Please refer to release notes for 4.1.6 for more details.

4.1.3 - 11th January 2016

Fixes

• PSD-129 OSCE: Updated Candidate feedback report to render properly (removing not necessary columns) when only "Include item breakdown" is selected.

4.1.2 - 6th January 2016

Fixes

• PSD-132: Reports / Candidate feedback (OSCE) - Removed duplicate candidate information (ID & Name) from the report so it's displayed only once

4.1.0 - 15th December 2015

New features & changes

• New Examiner and Candidate tagging & filtering (see Managing Candidates and Examiners documentation for more details)
  • Examiners and Candidates can now be organised into the groups using Blueprints
  • Candidate and Examiner selection and filtering has been updated to take advantage of the groups
• PSD-132: Reports / Candidate feedback - It is possible to hide 'cohort average', 'number of questions' and 'class average'
• Reports - removed option to generate PDF and permalinks from the 'old' reports - users should use exam overview page

Fixes

• Fixed initial synchronisation huge size when pushing Written exams to iPads
• PSD-132: Reports / Candidate feedback - Removed bulleting for station title under Feedback from Examiners
• Make sure that the Item maximum score is updated correctly when changes are made to Mark Scheme, Local or Global observation criteria
• Standard setting grade on the Edit marks screen has been made read only and is populated from the actual marks given to the candidate so it's not necessary to edit the information twice. Standard settings grade can be changed when editing individual marks for the candidate.
• Fixed circuit dropdown order throughout the system to be ordered ascending consistently by circuit number

4.0.9 - 11th November 2015

• Fixed problems importing marks into an exam

4.0.8 - 10th November 2015

• Fixed PRAC-623 Drag & Drop on view starting rooms not working properly
• Fixed PRAC-733 Station Cut score report - regression graph does not start from min value

Document change history