Using R to Create and Solve Assessment Problems for an Online Math for General Education Course

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for teachers is creating appropriate assessment problems to ask their students. Additionally, it may be more difficult to create a large library of questions in order to avoid cheating and provide students multiple attempts on a particular type of problem to deepen their understanding. I have used the mathematical program R to alleviate some of the struggles a teacher may face creating these problems. Specifically, I have written programs that create and solve problems involving apportionment and graph theory for the University of Central Oklahoma’s Math for General Education online course. Within the programs is a problem creator that builds a question using randomized numbers and solves it using a specified algorithm.