Suggestion: Question Selection

[sirjake]

Steve,

An idea that I think would be very helpful would be to have a selection window where you can choose which questions you wish to be asked (specifically). Such that you could have the question stem shown (like in the window when you view missed questions), and have a checkbox next to each question in a section. Thus, you check the questions you want to review, hit next, and can review only those questions. The reason this matters is that when I'm studying, often it will take a while for each question to load. So if there are very rudimentary questions that I already know that I have to wait to load (particularly if they have images), it slows me down. I'd much rather focus on the unknown material than the stuff that I've known since I was 12.

I think it'd be great if you listed every subsection in an entire subject on one page with the checkboxes. I.e., you click on biology, you can go ahead and go through the sections like normal, but there's a link at the bottom that says "select individual questions." They'd be ordered exactly as they are now, except that it would show all 800 plus questions, you could select the ones you want, then click next. It'd also be great because often there are five or ten questions from a subsection that I haven't mastered, but it's a pain to wade through the other 70 questions to get just those. I'd rather get the five from the first subsection, the five from the second, and the five from the last and focus on those rather than all 800 questions at once.

I'm not a programmer, but having worked in customer support for a computer company for over a year with databases and all, it sounds feasible to me.

[sgloer]

Thanks for taking the time to write your suggestion; in most cases it would not be difficult to implement, BUT--

About 2 years ago, we made a major overhaul of our test engine. The overwhelming goal was to not have to associate and store any information with any particular test user, to not have to store any data to the hard-drive, etc. to maximize speed and to minimize sources of instability and crashes.

This put some real limitations on how we do things. In particular, we can't pull questions from more than one chapter at a time, and we can't customize the subset of questions.

This version of the test engine has run very well and smoothly for us, so we've been reluctant to do any changes that would require deep-down changes. Besides--for most people, such level of customization would merely be a luxury. Biology is probably the main exception, but there's really no reason the questions should load that slowly, even for most dialup connections...

I would recommend writing what question number you want to skip to, and just using the Jump feature to jump ahead to that question whenever necessary.

Good luck on your test!

[sirjake]

OK. Thanks for responding. I still think it should be done, but I understand your perspective. Thanks again!

[ShotoJuku]

Works fine for me as it is Steve, keep up the great work!