Create a question bank assignment

You have the possibility to create a new question bank assignment from within your question bank and manually add the exercises to this assignment. To create a new question bank assignment, follow the steps below.

1. Click domain School name in the menu on the left.
2. Click folder Question banks in the menu at the top.
3. Click on your question bank or use the search bar. 
4. Click assignment Question bank assignments in the menu at the top. 
5. Click New assignment.
6. Fill in the name and click the dropdown menu to select the assignment type. 
7. Click Save. 

Once you have created the assignment, you can manually add exercises to your assignment. Selecting your exercises can be done more easily by making use of the filters in your question bank. This way you can select the specific exercises you want to be added to your assignment based on your preferences. At a later stage, you will also have the option to randomise the exercises you have added to your question bank assignment once the assignment is copied to a course. This can be done by making use of flow. 

To add exercises from a question bank to an assignment using filters, follow the steps below.

1. Click domain School name in the menu on the left.
2. Click folder Question banks in the menu at the top.
3. Click on your question bank or use the search bar. 
4. Click the extension Exercises tab.
5. Adjust the filters to your specific requirements. 
6. Check the box of the exercises you want to add to your assignment.
7. Click on the dropdown menu More above the list of exercises and click Add to assignment.
8. Select your assignment or create a new assignment.
9. Click Confirm. 

When selecting the exercises, you will have the option to bulk select all the exercises that are still visible after adjusting the filters by clicking the checkbox at the top. This allows you to quickly add all of the exercises to the question bank assignment in one go. The order that the exercises are added to your question bank assignment, is based on the creation date of the exercises. This order can later be adjusted in your course assignment.

Next to creating a question bank assignment from scratch, you can also generate an assignment by using a blueprint. You will first need to create your blueprint within the question bank to be able to generate your assignment. Once a blueprint has been created, you can follow the steps below to generate a question bank assignment. 

1. Click domain School name in the menu on the left.
2. Click folder Question banks in the menu at the top.
3. Click on your question bank or use the search bar.
4. Click on assignment Question bank assignments in the menu at the top. 
5. Click on Generate.
6. Fill in a name for the new assignment.  
7. Click the dropdown menu Blueprint and select the blueprint you want to use.
8. Check the various options that apply:
   • Labels: include or exclude exercises with a specific label in the exercise selection.
   • Exercise selection: fixed or randomised exercises per participant.
     • Fixed 
       This assignment will have a fixed set of exercises which will be identical for all participants.
     • Randomised per participant
       This assignment will have a mixed set of exercises which will be different for each participant. The exercises are placed into flow groups when the assignment is copied to a course. Every participant receives a unique assignment based on the blueprint parameters. Ans keeps track of which exercises from the question bank have been included in previous assignments for specific participants. If alternative exercises are available, those previously selected will be excluded from their current assignment.
   • Exclude exercises from assignments: excludes the exercises which were chosen in the selected assignments.
   • Filter on feedback: use questions with feedback.
   • Filter on p-value: exclude questions that lie outside the boundaries indicated.
   • Filter on question type and tags: determine the number of questions per question type and the number of questions with a certain tag.
9. Click Generate.

The question bank assignment is generated on the basis of specific criteria and settings in your blueprint. The exact working how questions and exercises are selected based on the different criteria and settings is explained below.

If you are dissatisfied with some of the exercises included in the generated assignment, you always have the option to manually remove them. You can remove exercises by following the steps below. 

1. Click domain School name in the menu on the left.
2. Click folder Question banks in the menu at the top.
3. Click on your question bank or use the search bar. 
4. Click on assignment Question bank assignments in the menu at the top. 
5. Click on your question bank assignment or use the search bar.
6. Select the checkboxes next to the exercises you want to remove. 
7. Click More and click Remove from assignment.

If you use a blueprint, Ans will select the questions from the question bank. This can be done either at random or fixed, depending on the way of generation which you have selected. More information on this can be found above. As explained in the manage blueprints article, you need to define the number of questions that will be selected with a certain objective. However, it might be possible that an exercise contains questions with different objectives. Below, you can read more information on how Ans deals with these kind of situations. We will use a simple example to explain how Ans selects questions. In our example, we have the following exercises, questions and objectives:

Exercise	Question - Objective
1	Question 1a - Objective A Question 1b - Objective A
2	Question 2a - Objective A Question 2b - Objective B
3	Question 3a - Objective A

In the table above you can see that there are four questions with objective A connected, and one question with objective B connected. However, the four questions with objective A connected, are spread over three different exercises. We will use a simple example where the blueprint will select:

• Two questions with objective A
• One question with objective B

You have the option to filter on elements such as question type and p-value. These options are explained in the section 'Selection of questions with blueprint and filtering options'. In this part of the article, the filtering options are left out.

While generating, Ans will go through the list of possible questions that can be selected. In this case, three questions need to be selected. An important point of attention to take into account is that Ans checks the questions for generating the assignment, however the whole exercise will be selected. The following process is executed in the background:

1. First, Ans will seek for a possible question with objective A. This selection is done at random. In the example, it can be possible that question 1a, 1b, 2a or 3a is selected in this first step. The exercise of the selected question is added to the assignment. For example, if Ans selects question 2a, exercise 2 including questions 2a and 2b are added to the assignment.
2. The second step depends on the outcome of the first step. It is possible that the blueprint has already fulfilled the requirement of having two questions with objective A selected (if exercise 1 is added). Therefore, the second step can be one of the following options:
   • Completion of the requirement of two questions with objective A if less than two questions were added in the first step.
   • Check for questions with objective B connected if two questions with objective A were added in the first step.
3. If the requirement of the blueprint has been fulfilled after step 2, the assignment is complete and will be generated (in case of the second bullet of step 2). If the requirement of objective B was not fulfilled, Ans will try to find a question with objective B.
4. As you can see, there are five possible situations for the example described above. We have described these below. The complexity of the process increases with additional questions.
   • Situation 1
     • Question 1a or 1b found, exercise 1 added, objective A completed.
     • Question 2b found, exercise 2 added, objective B completed.
     • End result: Two exercises with four questions added.
   • Situation 2
     • Question 2a found, exercise 2 added, objective A not completed (but B is completed).
     • Question 1a or 1b found, exercise 1 added, objective A completed.
     • End result: Two exercises with four questions added.
   • Situation 3
     • Question 2a found, exercise 2 added, objective A not completed (but B is completed).
     • Question 3 found, exercise 3 added, objective A completed.
     • End result: Two exercises with three questions added.
   • Situation 4
     • Question 3 found, exercise 3 added, objective A not completed.
     • Question 1a or 1b found, exercise 1 added, objective A completed.
     • Question 2b found, exercise 2 added, objective B completed.
     • End result: Three exercises with five questions added.
   • Situation 5
     • Question 3 found, exercise 3 added, objective A not completed.
     • Question 2b found, exercise 2 added, objective A and B completed.
     • End result: Two exercises with three questions added.

We advise to read the section 'Selection of questions with a blueprint' of this article first. In this part, the method of how the blueprint selects questions is explained. The use of filters is an addition to the selection with a blueprint and therefore knowledge on how the blueprint is used is needed before reading this part of the article.

The blueprint forms the basis of your assignment. The blueprint selects questions based on the objective. In the blueprint you can determine the number of questions that is selected per objective, regardless of other characteristics such as tags, labels, question type and p-value. Before Ans is generating an assignment, you can apply filters on the generation process. This reduces the set of questions out of which Ans selects the questions for the assignment. We will explain this method based on an easy example. The question bank contains the following questions:

Exercise	Question - Question type - Objective
1	Question 1a - Open question - Objective A Question 1b - Open question - Objective A
2	Question 2a - Match question - Objective A Question 2b - Multiple choice question - Objective B
3	Question 3a - Multiple choice question - Objective A
4	Question 4 - Multiple choice question - Objective B

We would like the blueprint to select the following questions:

• Two questions with objective A
• One question with objective B

Besides the blueprint, we use a filter to filter on question type. We do not want Ans to select match questions. Therefore we set the max to 0 on the question type match filter. Make sure to enable the filter by using the box on the left side on the question type.

Ans will take the filter limits into account while selecting questions. In this case no match questions are allowed to be selected. Ans will start as indicated earlier with objective A. Ans will check which questions contain objective A (questions 1a, 1b, 2a and 3a). These questions are in exercises 1, 2 and 3. After this step, Ans will exclude the exercises which contain a match question. In this case, this is exercise 2. Ans will try to fulfil the requirement of having two questions with objective A from the remaining exercises. As Ans starts at random with the exercise selection, there are two options: either exercise 1 is selected, or exercise 1 and 3 are selected. After the fulfilling the requirement of objective A, Ans will fulfil the requirement of objective B in the same way. In this case, exercise 2 is excluded from the possible exercises because of the match question. Therefore, question 4 is automatically added to the assignment.

It's possible to combine multiple filters. Ans will determine the set of exercises based on the blueprint in combination with the filters. The following filters are available:

• Labels
  Select the labels that exercises must have in order to be added to your assignment. By selecting labels, they will be included in the pool of exercises out of which Ans will select the exercises. If you want to exclude labels, you can select all other labels. By doing so, the exercises with the unselected label will not be selected.
• Exclude exercises from assignments
  Select assignments with exercises you do not want to use in your new assignment. This prevents exercises from your previous assignment from appearing again in a resit.
• Filter on feedback
  Only use closed questions in which feedback has been included. This is the feedback provided in the fields: answered correctly, answered partially correctly, answered incorrectly. This allows you to create an assignment in which participants can receive feedback on all questions, for instance for formative testing.
• Filter on p-value
  If your exercise was used in previous assignments, a p-value is calculated. The p-value is a score from 0 to 1 and represents the difficulty of the question. The higher the value, the easier the question. You have the option to set a p-value range from which exercises are chosen. This allows you to influence the difficulty of exercises for your assignment. 
• Filter on question type
  For all question types, you have the option to set how often this question type should occur.
• Filter on tag
  You can filter on tags connected to questions to select or exclude exercises from being added to your new assignment. When generating a question bank assignment, with a fixed amount of questions, first the exercises with the filtered tags are added, before adding exercises that do not match the tag filters.