Survey software that reports a score?

September 5, 2008 9:39 PM

I need to set up an online test that seems to be different than what many free testing tools or open source modules don't do out of the box.

I have been doing some web stuff for my son's PTA and they have a "green" survey they want me to get on the web. There are 50 some odd questions with 3 answers each. On every question, "A" counts 3 points, "B" counts 2 points and "C" counts 1. Parents are to take this test online and then see their score. There should also be a method that reports the score back to the PTA. Ideally it would be a spreadsheet with Name/Student's Name/Teacher's Name/Final Score, but I would settle for an email with that information for each time it is taken.

Maybe it's the hour or a frazzled brain at the end of a long week, but I can't seem to get this to work right. I could set this up in Moodle, but we don't want the parents taking the survey to have to register. I have installed LimeSurvey, that doesn't seem to do this sort of scoring automagically. I have a Joomla install for the PTA website, so an extension for Joomla would work too, but I would be happy to install any sort of standalone PHP app.

Any suggestions?

posted by spartacusroosevelt to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If this is a one-off thing, writing a normal html form, then scoring with a simple PHP script would probably be 100 times easier than trying to install/manage moodle, joomla, or any other script.

E.g., with input like so:
<input type="radio" name="question1" value="1"> A
<input type="radio" name="question1" value="2"> B
<input type="radio" name="question1" value="3"> C

and scoring like so:
$varname = "question";
$totalscore = 0;
$numberofquestions = 50;
for ($i=1; $i<> $totalscore += $_POST[$varname . $i];
}

(please forgive me for any errors, PHP is in my distant past)
posted by beerbajay at 12:27 AM on September 6, 2008

woops. the <> there should be a &lt=
posted by beerbajay at 12:28 AM on September 6, 2008

ack! <=
posted by beerbajay at 12:28 AM on September 6, 2008

oh sweet jesus.

for ($i=1; $i<=$numberofquestions; $i++) {
$totalscore += $_POST[$varname . $i];
}
posted by beerbajay at 12:30 AM on September 6, 2008

Have you tried Survey Monkey? I think it can do this.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:57 AM on September 6, 2008

Google spreadsheets can do a great job of this as well -see here
posted by Giant luck at 7:33 AM on September 8, 2008