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Maple T.A. On Your Campus Maple T.A. Makes Online Testing and Assignments Easy Maple T.A. supports complex, free-form entry and intelligent evaluation of responses Five thousand freshmen students are coming to your campus this fall. Although you are looking forward to the new wave of eager minds, their arrival bodes a Herculean task for you and your colleagues in the Mathematics Department. In batches of several hundred, you will herd them into auditoriums across campus. There, dozens of proctors will administer a paper-and-pencil placement test that decides which math course each freshman should take. Your department will have ordered 5000 paper copies of the test from a now overjoyed printing company. Faculty will have spent hours creating multiple versions of the test to hinder--they hope--neighboring students from trading answers. After the test, still more staff will have to run 5000 multiple-choice answer sheets through the scanner. Many hours and dollars later, the hard questions still linger. Will the test place each student in the right course? How many test takers will guess or cheat their way into multivariable calculus but don't know a cosine from a stop sign? Can a multiple-choice test really gauge a student’s grasp of mathematical concepts? Maple T.A. can free schools from the cost, effort and limitations of paper-and-pencil assessment. Maple T.A. is a web-based assessment and teaching software product from Maplesoft. With it, instructors can create online mathematics tests, assignments, and practice sessions that are graded by the Maple engine. Students take the tests through a standard web browser, while a Maple engine running on the Maple T.A. server automatically grades the assignment as soon as the student submits it. They can enter their responses either by clicking buttons from a palette of math symbols or by typing scientific-calculator syntax into a text box. "It’s made it much much easier for me to teach the course online. The students can just take the test and then have it graded instantly. I don’t have to do any of that work and we don’t have the 5 or 6 day time delay of sending papers back and forth through the mail." - Professor Kevin Vang, Minot State University Maple T.A. opens the door to free-form questions like “Find the union of the sets {a, b, c, d} and {b, e, c, f},”       or “Give an example of an increasing function on the interval [0, 1].” In the design of the second question, for example, you can have the Maple server automatically check whether the derivative of the student’s response is non-negative on [0, 1]. Maple T.A. also allows randomized questions, which obviates the manual creation of multiple versions of a test. In the first example above, you could either have Maple T.A. generate random elements in the sets, pick sets at random from a collection that you specify in advance, or have the Maple server generate random sets of random size. Thus, during an exam, every student would see a slightly different version of the question. During a practice session, a student could repeat an exercise with different parameters. You can also include Maple plots inside Maple T.A. questions. For example, you could give students a 3-D plot of a function f(x,y) and ask them to pick the contour plot that matches it.