Question exclusivity can be achieved by creating a cross reference table in the VISION Developer Module and assigning the same attributes to exam questions within the same objective. The purpose of linking these exam items together is that when an exam is being built by the VISION Learning Station, if one of these questions gets selected for the exam, all remaining questions with the same identifier will not be selected within the same objective. This procedure is only useful if the questions for any single objective are too similar to be used together on the same exam. This will ensure that the Learning Station does not use more than one question from the group of similar questions on any given test.
Follow these steps to make similar exam questions exclusive:
1.In VISION Developer, click on the Cross Reference menu, and choose Open.
2.A cross reference table will open, at the bottom click the New button.
3.Check for an existing table with a User ID of Q_SIM. If there, open the table and skip to step 7.
4.Enter “Question Similarity” as the title of the table.
5.Enter Q_SIM as the User Defined ID. The VISION Learning Station looks for this name by design.
6.Click the Shared radio button and click the OK button.
7.VISION will ask if you would like the Question Similarity Cross Reference Table displayed in the right portion of the workscreen. Click Yes.
8.The next step is to add items. (These are the items that the questions will be associated with). Choose New Items from the Cross Reference menu or click the New Items button at the top of the Cross Reference window.
a.You can use any alphanumeric character, and ordinary ASCII punctuation such as spaces, dashes, periods. For example, you could use the letters A through Z, numbers 1 through 100 or, words, “First Grouping”, “Second Grouping”, etc.
9.Finally, open up an Objective hierarchy and highlight the first set of similar questions in the links area. Right click on the item you want and click Link from the menu that pops up. You can also drag the questions to the item if you wish.
10.Open up the objective hierarchy and select the desired objective. Make sure the questions are not in Active status.
11. In the question links window, highlight the questions that you want to group into a single set and, in the cross-reference window, highlight the item you want to link these questions to. Then right click on the cross reference window, and click Link from the pop up menu (you can also drag the questions to the cross-reference item). A confirmation message will appear.
12. Make sure that all of the questions that are similar to each other are linked together on one item, not different items. You can use different items for different sets of questions.
Exam Exclusivity cannot be turned on and off; once questions are in the table, they will become exclusive. To stop this from happening, they must be removed from the table.
