SCHOOL STUDENT, CLASS, AND TEST ADMINISTRATION. This set of applications is a series of more than a dozen individual interactive applications that automated the entire student administration and testing operations of a major Air Force school. Incoming students are entered into the database, and the computer assigns them to appropriate classrooms based on school policy for student distribution. During the term, students had three "mix" sessions to attend, in which the requirements were that the students must be in a new classroom containing students with whom they had not been in a class or mix before. The application properly distributed students for all mixes. Additionally, the application allowed staff to enter test questions into a test question databank, ensuring the questions (stem, answer, and distractors) were all in accordance with stated objectives, proper testing protocols, and school guidance. When it was time to generate a test, the computer would automatically generate a specified number of questions for each objective by random selection from the databank, and would print the master copy of the test and the teacher's answer sheet the morning the test was to be administered. The application then directly interfaced with a Scantron 5200 to automatically read in the students' answer sheets and score their tests. It would then print out student score reports, identifying students either by name or by Social Security Number (user selectable), and printed the proper score sheets for each home classroom. Additionally, the application performed advanced testing analysis on each test, keeping cumulative scores for all tests, so as to identify which questions were most effective and which were always missed by students. Test effectiveness reports can be printed at any time.

Results: Prior to this program, it took three people two days to generate each mix session; the computer would do this automatically in about two minutes. Before this program, tests had to be constructed manually, graded manually, it required significant effort to produce a test analysis for each test, and there were no cumulative analyses at all. The program allowed tests to be produced in about ten minutes, graded for the entire class (usually about 100 students) in about five minutes, and performed test analyses immediately after test grading.