Want to practice for your exams?
I was thinking of how was going to prepare for my DBA and IS exams, summarising the content of the course and trying to answer the learning goals is what I came up with. Pretty standard right?
It all changed when I came across this AI tool! It’s called MagicForm, what does it do?
Well, let me show you. Take for example the lecture notes from DBA, a long piece of text containing all the information you might need to answer the MC questions. Copy page 8 and a bit more on page 9, max 6000 words in the free version of the tool (only text as well), and paste it inside the MagicForm. Specify the question type, number of questions and language. Go grab your cup of coffee while the form does it’s magic.
The result?
A test for you: https://forms.gle/ryp51B49hiSDaZXo9
See in the image below, an example of a question that was generated.
I’m actually thinking that if I give the MagicForm text that contains the answers to the practice exam, it might generate similar questions to the practice exam, and thus vice versa for the exam right?. That would be an extremely interesting situation. Thus I went out to test my hypothesis. Which turned out to be harder than expected. I might have to feed the form my summary/notes for better questions.
I couldn’t prove it confirm my hypothesis due to two things: lack of clear textual description and the fact that questions on an exam require you to apply knowledge. Whereas the MagicForm only creates questions aimed at repetition.
My conclusion is that the MagicForm can create questions for yourself to see if you remember the knowledge that you have to apply and it could serve a role at the end of a lecture to provide some interactivity and test if the audience has been paying attention but to really practice for the exam you’ll have to come up with the questions yourself.
I believe that most students are currently preparing for their exams and so am I so I thought that this blog post would be interesting and useful. I just tried using MagicForm myself for the first time and I believe that this will change the way I practice for my exams as I can practice with the exam questions that are generated by MagicForm instead of relying on the few practice questions that are usually provided by the professors. While MagicForm will not necessarily replace the critical thinking aspect that is needed during exams, I believe that it is a useful resource to promote interactive learning and self-assessment.
Hey Rick! Interesting topic! I think this is a new perspective on quite a popular topic of AI in education. From what I see here, seems like AI can generate rather realistic exam questions. Obviously, the more information you give to it (e.g. notes, summaries), the more tailored the questions can be. While exams indeed ask us to “apply” the knowledge, I think this works a bit differently in the context of the MC questions. With the MC questions, the boundaries are set – i.e. you have a predefined number of possible answers and your correct answer is limited to 1 – as opposed to open questions with countless possibilities of variations of one answer. Additionally, making the MC question does not seem to require “creativity” due to its bounded nature. I think it would mean that this AI tool would work rather well with the MCc and the quality depends purely on the comprehensiveness of the information provided by the creator. In the case of open questions though, I would assume the tool at its current level can potentially be “confused” as the goal is rather complex.
Just thinking out loud! Thanks again for the post!