Computer-aided education and evaluation of student exam tasks from MS Excel

Abstract

The MS Office suite is currently one of the most used software. Perfect mastery of the work with its components, especially with the MS Word text editor and the MS Excel spreadsheet has become a virtually indispensable requirement in every profession where personal computers are used. Operating numerous, more complex functions, for example MS Excel, is necessary for efficient and fast work with spreadsheets, and yet for many users these features are literally “scary”. Even though MS Excel has already been taught at secondary schools, its level of mastery by students is inadequate for practice, and therefore it becomes a part of the curriculum in many higher education programs. In the article, we describe the software that we created for the automated evaluation of students' tasks from the program MS Excel. The software is capable of evaluating multiple tests of different types all at once. For defining the tests, the software uses an XML file in which the respective questions with multiple parameters are described. For example, in tasks where students have to copy Excel terms, the original term, the address of the original term, the direction and length of the copy are given in the XML file. Naturally, the software has some limitations; nevertheless, it is a useful tool for a teacher.