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I'm using exams2nops() from R/exams to prepare multiple variants of an exam (as part of an open-book-exam). I'd like to obscure the variant/group of exam a test-taker is assigned to (in order to prevent "team work" during the open book exam: "Hey guys, who else is in group 1 ?!").

By default, the exams2nops() function will print the exam ID automatically on the title page (in my case: 20112600001):

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It appears there's no argument in the exams2nops() function to prevent the exam ID to be printed on the title page of the PDF exam. I am unsure where to adapt the underlying TeX template.

So my question is: How to suppress the exam ID on the title page of the PDF for NOPS exams?

Achim Zeileis
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Sebastian Sauer
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1 Answers1

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You are correct that this is not possible in exams2nops(), the simple reason being that the ID is essential for automatically evaluating NOPS exams after scanning them. Thus, if you want to scan the NOPS PDF file you must not remove the ID. The standard strategy for making team work on the same ID impossible would be to simply generate a different random PDF with a different ID for every participant.

If you are not actually scanning the exam, then I would recommend using exams2pdf() rather than exams2nops() and simply "roll your own" LaTeX template. If you want to take inspiration from the NOPS template, then you can create one on the fly (here with 2 exercises) via:

make_nops_template(2, file = "mynops.tex")

Note, however, that this has quite a few options that can be controlled through appropriate header commands in exams2pdf(), e.g.,

exams2pdf(c("anova", "boxplots"),
  template = "mynops.tex",
  header = list(
    nopsinstitution = "Sauer School of Statistics",
    nopstitle = "Exam",
    nopscourse = " (AWM)",
    "newcommand{\\mylogo}" = ""
  )
)

In addition to the elements above, one would usually specify Date, ID and the NOPS language comments (see ?nops_language). But rather than using the header argument for this I would recommend to edit mynops.tex "by hand" and hard-code all the relevant aspects, including omitting the ID.

Achim Zeileis
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    That was very instructive, thank you. I agree that individual PDFs would be preferable, but my cohort ist large (400 students), and I'm not aware of a Moodle way to distribute individual files to the students automatically (I don't want to do that by hand). That's way I'd like to come up with a limited number of groups (say, 40), and distribute the respective group-wise PDF to the students (and thus hiding the exam ID). I think your way of adapting the TeX template is the way to go. – Sebastian Sauer Nov 26 '20 at 07:12
  • Well, you know what I would say (do a quiz rather than file assignment/upload). But if you need to go through file assignments then this Moodle plugin seems to do what you are looking for: https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=assignment_random – Achim Zeileis Nov 26 '20 at 08:30
  • I'll definitely have to do some load tests on our moodle server. Thanks for the hint to the plugin. – Sebastian Sauer Nov 26 '20 at 08:52