The Urbana SoftwareTM
PerTest® Engine
 The mainstay of the Enterprise Suite that all PerTest® applications interact
with. The Engine provides test/assessment generation, result collection,
diagnostic analysis, event notification, and remediation along
with many other services.
The PerTest® Engine is:
- Standards compliant: AICC, SCORM, EJB 2.0,
J2EE, JMS, XML, SOAP, HTTPS, JMX, Java WebStart, and DocBook
- Scalable: PerTest® Engine components can be distributed across multiple servers
- Fault tolerant: PerTest® Engine components can be deployed redundantly
- Portable:
- Supports Windows NT, 2000, XP, Linux, and all major Unix variants
- Supports Oracle, SQLServer, and PostreSQL
Leverages four key Urbana SoftwareTM technologies:
- Diagnostic Tree: a hierarchy of diagnoses (including content,
strategy, and distractors) that allows PerTest® to diagnose an
examinees strengths and weaknesses while providing implementers
the ability to map assessments against standards (such as State
standards). A key Diagnostic Tree feature is its ability to
merge with other diagnostic trees to obtain a holistic view
for various aggregates such as a classroom of students;
- Intermediate Test Format: A data representation of a test
that can be easily converted to various formats such as PerTest's
own Test Definition Language (TDL) or to a standard such as
IMS' QTI;
- Test Versioning: Allows incremental changes to tests while
simultaneously storing old data for change tracking and historical
reporting; and
- Test Journalaling: An XML format that tracks all of a user's
actions while taking a test, allowing the PerTest® Engine to
analyze behavioural patterns such as crossing out response alternatives,
changing or deselecting an answer.
Includes a variety of diagnostics:
PerTest® Engine diagnostics are one of many pluggable components giving
customers the ability to extend the system with new diagnostics (e.g. capturing and analyzing a users pulse in relation to subject matter).
The PerTest® Enterprise Suite includes the following diagnostics:
- Subject Matter Analysis
- Distractor Analysis
- Crossout Analysis
- Timing Analysis
- Guessing Strategy Analysis
- Difficulty Analysis
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