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Python 89.67% Shell 0.01% TeX 8.20% Elixir 1.32% Euphoria 0.70% Makefile 0.10%

ptyx-mcq's Introduction

pTyX MCQ Extension

MCQ generation (PDF files) and automatic marking of scanned students answers.

Overview

pTyX is a LaTeX precompiler, written in Python. pTyX enables to generate LaTeX documents, using custom commands or plain python code. One single pTyX file may generate many latex documents, with different values. I developed and used pTyX to make several versions of a same test in exams, for my student, to discourage cheating. Since it uses sympy library, pTyX has symbolic calculus abilities too.

The pTyX MCQ extension makes it easy to use pTyX to generate Multiple Choice Questions in the form of pdf documents. The students MCQ can then be scanned and automatically corrected and marked.

Installation

Obviously, pTyX needs a working Python installation. Python version 3.8 (at least) is required for pTyX MCQ to run.

Currently, pTyX is only supported on GNU/Linux.

The easiest way to install it is to use pip.

$ pip install --user ptyx_mcq

Usage

To generate a template, run:

$ mcq new new_folder

This will generate a new_folder folder with a new.ptyx file inside, which is the main configuration file.

This will also create a new_folder/questions/ folder, where you should put all the exercises, as .txt files.

A few text files are already included as examples.

See the next section (MCQ file format) for more information about those files format.

To compile the template, run:

$ mcq make

For more options:

$ mcq make --help

To automatically corrected the scanned students MCQs, but them as a pdf inside new_folder/scan.

Then run:

$ mcq scan

MCQ file format

When running mcq new, a template folder will be generated, including a new.ptyx file.

(More to come...)

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ptyx-mcq's Issues

Rename `mcq update` to `mcq include`.

Create several subcommands:
mcq include update -> add all found .ex files.
mcq include clean -> clean all imports
mcq include resolve -> import code from included files.

Set HASHSEED, to make program more deterministic ?

Setting HASHSEED avoid reproducibility bugs (compiling twice the same document should produce the same result).

import os
import sys
hashseed = os.getenv('PYTHONHASHSEED')
if not hashseed:
    os.environ['PYTHONHASHSEED'] = '0'
    os.execv(sys.executable, [sys.executable] + sys.argv)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/64138050

Add cli command to visualise amended pdf.

Add mcq view <extract of student name | student id>cli command.
Use xdg-open to open pdf.

Add to function to compare LaTeX expressions and test if there will be rendered identically

The function would be used to avoid proposing the (visually) same answer twice.

The heuristic could be the following : every answer will be converted to a canonic form (which may not be valid LaTeX code), used for comparison.
This function will of course give false negatives, but it will still be better than cuurent basic LaTeX code comparison.

The canonic form would be generated by applying the following rules :

seems safe : \, \; \. \quad \qquad -> space
seems safe : several spaces or tabs -> one space : s = re.sub("\s+", " ", s)
not so safe : recursively : {} -> empty string. This one may lead to false positives though : \command{}text -> \commandtext.
Should we accept the risk, or take more precautions (test if there is a command r"\\\w+ before {})?

Note that false positives or negatives are not very damaging as long as the error message is very explicit and provide tips to fix it.