WebTeach in practice: the entrance test to the Engineering faculty in Florence

The WebTeach [1] project started in 1999 as a simple web interface to a database for the management of students scheduling for examinations. At present it has grown to include three different tools: WebCheck, which corresponds to the original database interface, WebWrite, a powerful version of the WikiWikiWeb [2] concept, and WebTest, a set of tools for the generation and automatic evaluation of multiple-choice mathematical quizzes. All this work was done in a semi-volunteer way, pushed by the appreciation of our colleagues and of students. Our system is gaining consensus mainly because we try to implement all enhancements suggested. We also tried to delegate as much administrative and management work as possible to users, both teachers and students. So teachers have the freedom of adding users, courses and examinations to the database, and students have the power of editing most of pages in the WebWrite space. As a comparison, the official web-based service of the university of Florence is systematically affected by the so called “system-manager bottleneck syndrome”, for which each administrative change has to wait for official approval. After five years of improvements, WebWrite was massively tested this year in correspondence to the entrance test to the engineering faculty of the University of Florence, 900 participants for two mathematical tests. The system was used for test management, immediate self-evaluation of answers, optical reading of the elaborates using inexpensive hardware, and a HOWTO forum to students. All the software was developed in Perl and C using free tools on a Linux machine, and the whole project will be released using a GPL [3] license in the near future. 2 The entrance test