Saving data in an AICC course

Question:
From an AICC course can a score be saved for each page that has test questions? If so, can you save one score per course, one score per test, or one score per test question? If a student re-takes a test does the first score get stored or overwritten?

Answer:
In theory, a score can be stored for each question. To do this we will need to make each page of questions a unit/SCO. That way you can store a score for each page of questions. Alternatively, within the course, we could define an objective that is a composite score for several questions. Once again, I haven’t seen an AICC-based LMS that would store/report the objectives and interactions, so this is a moot point. Generally, I only see one score per unit. So, if you want more granularity, you have to break your content up into one question=one unit. When you throw in the delays for launching units, this becomes instructionally painful for the student. (Most LMS's take 8 to 20 seconds to store a unit and launch the next unit) If a student retakes a test, it is up to the LMS to decide what to do. My preference, as you see with ReadyGo SST, is to append the result to the report. However, most LMSs only report a single score, so they will tend to overwrite results from previous sessions. I have never seen an LMS that will store more than one score for a single student session. So, the student could take the test 15 times until they pass, and only the final score is reported (without recording that the student took the test 15 times.) Of course, the course itself could also track how many times the student took the test, but there is no way to report this except in the “suspend_data”, which the LMS does not view since there is no standard for it. SCORM 2004 addresses this, but for it to work, the LMS has to relaunch the unit each time the student wants to retake the test.