This page contains list of releases and changes for the Practique Server software.
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
Report changes
Candidate feedback report:
Exam analysis report:
Station cut score report:
Other changes:
* which columns are affected by the display changes
* Passing score column - Do we need this as it seems just as a rounded Cut+SEM?
* Examiners screen
* ??
* Candidate marks (via Current session > View Candidates, Standard settings > Candidates)
* Rounding - Pass/Fail column
* Formatting - ?
* View items (via Current session > View Items, Standard settings > Items)
* Rounding - Passes (calculates correct number of passes)
* Formatting - ?
* Marks for one station — ??
* Formatting - X, Y formatted to show 2 decimal places
* Question Statistics Analysis Report
*
* Candidate feedback report
* Rounding - Pass/Fail calculation
* Formatting - Percentage values through out use 2 decimal places precision
* Exam analysis report
* Formatting - Minimum score, Maximum score, Median, Mode, Mean use 2 decimal places presision
* Formatting - Cut score & SEM section use 2 decimal places precision
* Rounding - Cut score & SEM section reports accurate number of passes
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. For more information about Clickjacking please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickjacking.
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:
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.
Fixes
PSD-112: Problems importing SBA questions using CSV and XLSX formats
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.
Fixes
PSD-130: OSCE Reporting: Station Cut Score graph has been improved:
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.
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.
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.
Fixes
Fixes
New features & changes
Fixes