New Feature: Question Pooling

We have just released an often-requested feature -- Question Pooling.

It is now possible to create an assignment and have WebAssign select different questions for each student, out of a "pool" of questions that you specify. In the example below, the assignment is set to choose 5 random questions (from a pool of 39) for questions 8 through 12.

You decide which questions should be in a pool, and how many questions to use from the pool on your assignment. And of course we're all about flexibility -- you can use a question pool as the entire assignment (great for making practice assignments out of TestBank style questions!) or make an assignment with one or more pools among specific questions.

To create a pool, first select some questions in the normal way using the Question Browser. Then choose those questions that you want to pool, and select "Create Pool" at the bottom of the question list.

If you need to take some questions back out of the pool, click the small icon with three dots and an arrow which is to the left of the question name. Clicking the trash can icon on the right removes the question from the assignment entirely.

Note that once students have downloaded an assignment you should not make any changes to question pools -- doing so could cause every student to get new questions for that entire pool and lose their previous work.

Also, in the left panel of the Question Browser you'll now see an "add these" link next to each section name. Clicking that link will add all questions from that section to the Question List on the right panel of the Question Browser. From there you can easily click "select all" and "create pool" if desired -- this makes it much easier to put all the TestBank questions for a chapter into a pool, for example.

We hope you find these new features useful. As always your feedback is welcome!

The WebAssign Team