Release Notes - 8.0.0

Owned by Radim Novotny
Last updated: Jan 25, 2024 by Melanie Whyte
5 min read

New Features

Segregated Question Bank

Question bank segregation allows you to control the authoring and management of items more granularly across your organisation.  It provides efficiency and extra security in your exam processes as users only see what they need to reducing errors. Previously permissions were based around functional elements of the Practique system (create an item; edit an item set etc). The new Question Bank Segregation feature gives you the capability to manage permissions across different groups within your organisation, such as specialities or year groups.  

For example; "I am a cardiologist, and I don't want my urologist colleagues seeing my questions", "I am a Year 3 coordinator, and I don't want to have access to Year 2 content” or "I am a medicine administrator, and I don't want my colleagues in nursing to be able to use medicine questions in their exams"

As an administrator, you will be able to determine which areas of the system users can view and edit by tagging them based on a blueprint dimension, with the ability to assign different roles per speciality for those users with multiple.

Question Bank Translation 

For customers who need to deliver exams in multiple languages, you can now create and manage translated versions of your questions and resources.  Question authors can select the language with which they want to create the question/resource in, and from the original item create a translated version to link them together simply. New filtering is available so you can search for specific language versions.  When adding resources to questions Practique will automatically choose the resource in the same language as the question if there is one available.  

Users can have a preferred language as authors, so everything they create will be in their language as default.

Multi Part Written Questions

Question authors can construct multi part SAQs so that questions can have sub questions included.  Each sub question has a stem, number of lines, number of marks, model answer, comments and tagging associated with it.  You can also add image resources and tables at the sub question level. And you can re-order the subquestions easily.  The questions can be exported to word should paper based exams be required, and will be available by PDF in a future release.  You can also now upload multi-part questions by CSV/XLXS should you be looking to batch larger quantities.

Translated Exam Delivery

Your translated questions can now be delivered electronically or on paper (PDF or Word).

MCQ/SBA Randomisation

You can view questions in the question bank with the answers ordered either alphanumerically or custom order (order they are created in).  When delivering the exam you can choose to display the question answers either alphanumerically, custom order or randomly.

Customised Item Review Process

Your organisation can now add extra stages to the default item review process (draft, pending, approved, archived/retired) to more closely match your in-house process.  For example 'ready for review' before pending, or 'reviewed' after.

Mark Amendments Logging

For added security any mark amendments have to be approved and an audit trail is now available to assure that any changes to marks are attributed to a user. 

Adjustable Borderline Marking

In standard setting, you can now apply ‘Adjustable Borderline Regression’ to set the intercept value for the exam or at individual station level if required. By default, Practique sets the intercept at 1.0, this value can now be adjusted to 1.5 for example.

Marks for SAQ Questions

Question Markers are now able to see maximum marks available for SAQ questions in the word and PDF previews, and space has been added to the questions to allow room for marks to be added.  Candidates will also be able to see the total marks for SAQ items in their exam so they know how long their answers should be.

Sequential testing for OSCE

For customers who use sequential testing for OSCE, it is now possible to combine the results of each sequence to produce an overall set of results for a cohort. In sequential testing, candidates who fail the exam (sequence 1) are required to sit a further exam (sequence 2) to determine their overall pass/fail outcome. Candidates who pass sequence 1 undergo no further testing.

 

Resolved Support Requests

  • PSD-3494 Fixed answer order for EMQ stems (all stems must use the same order)

  • PSD-3545 Fixed quotes stripping, fixed and updated tests

  • PSD-3604 Fixed tests

  • PSD-3545-Importing-numeric-answers

  • PSD-3604 XSS - removed |safe filter from page_header template, changed all render_page_header tags to not use HTML code

  • PSD-3603 updated wording

  • PSD-3603 Added per exam P4B download count

  • PSD-3545-Importing-numeric-answers) Removed pdb

  • PSD-3591 Allow to check exam details even if diet is in progress

  • PSD-3591 Showing whether an exam is randomised on Edit exam details page

  • PSD-3595 Display an item set assigned to an exam day on View sessions page

  • PSD-3584 Answer Option rendering

  • PSD-3580 Make sure the raw response is exported as a string as well

  • PSD-3580 Fixed exporting responses with a leading = character

  • PSD-3469 Do not show View raw responses button for a Combined exam

  • PSD-3575 Fixed unhandled error when exporting ResultJson objects to XLS

  • PSD-3553 Itemset name change

  • PSD-3469 OSCE Marksheet formatting

  • PSD-3558 Fixed base class for P8

  • PSD-3450-Marking-VSAQ-Answer-Colours

  • PSD-3523 Fix wrong session timeout behaviour

  • PSD-3524 Fixed tests

  • PSD-3542 XLS file is parsed as "data_only" so it does not keep the formulas during import but evaluates them if possible. That fixes issue with references to other cells that contain the required value

  • PSD-3526 Updated rounding - format_score method - we round the displayed value according to the round_decimal to keep the same rounding as on other places

  • PSD-3526 Added configurable decimal rounding method to settings

  • PSD-3537 Added validator for Max score when importing items

  • PSD-3517 Item not showing in preview

  • PSD-3524 Convert carriage returns on import

  • PSD-3527 Fixed import of items/resources tagged with text dimensions

  • PSD-3518 Changed integer reference to WSI user roles to constants

  • PSD-3518 Fixed serializing P4B candidate resources

  • PSD-2046 a few fixes related to persistent global criteria found after migrations

  • PSD-3512 Use int_to_letter instead of string.ascii_uppercase to allow more than 26 possible answers

  • PSD-3505 updated sync script

  • PSD-3341 WIP - prepare Chime meetings

  • PSD-3341 Use separate exma files for Candidates and Examiners on OSCE exam

  • PSD-3452-Update-TinyMCE-Pluggin

  • PSD-3454 Fixed datepicked on Create combined exam page, exam block date change and reposrs pages

  • PSD-3420 Fixed OSCE marksheet filename again, Fixed bug in the downloaded file extension, Fixed extension of a generated MHTML file bundle, Log errors caused by invalid PDFs

  • PSD-3420 Fixed path, Make user web server can access generated files before serving to user, Fixed item and item set preview with resourtces if some resources are invalid PDF files

  • PSD-2981 PSD-943 fixing "Back to Report" link error when creating items

  • PSD-2943 avoiding Permission denied when using backlink after editing an item, also removing "Back to item edit" backlink we dont need that anymore

  • PSD-2926 print login information for examiners is now in this order: circuit, role, room

  • PSD-2836 Fixed pdf error handling

  • PSD-2888 It is now possible to reorder automatically assigned item sets on the Pre-select item sets page. This order is preserved when the item sets are assigned to exam days. This applies to multi-block exams only

  • PSD-2919 Fixed workflow for persistent marksheet criteria if item was submited/rejected

  • PSD-2919 Added borderline_marker_origin field which allows to reset borderline_marker to the previous value in case of Reject

  • PSD-2805 Added url handler for downloading the itemset preview Word template. There is no button yet.

  • PSD-2836 Apply the current filter for count of items not tagged by any blueprint

  • PSD-2836 Share the filter between item list and blueprint report

  • PSD-2897 Fixed interview serializing to iPad devices for stations with more than one examination rounds

  • PSD-2836 Improved blueprint report and added search for not tagged items from the Item list page

  • PSD-2836 Added a RangeParameter for filtering

  • PSD-2885 bugfix: if user has no permission to edit items he is not allowed to change the order of custom schema answers as well by drag&drop

  • PSD-2280 Adding item preview buttons to Marksheet page also

  • PSD-2046 Implemented actions as background tasks, features for Global criteria changes