Persons who wish to use the exams we have prepared on their own site, or to
use them as a basis for their own further work, and who have the
Hot Potatoes product, can
download any of our exams and the workfile for them by changing the .htm
extension of the URL for the exam to .zip and downloading, unzipping the file,
and installing them all in the same directory. To do further work, just load
the workfile, which will have an extension beginning with the letter
"j", into Hot Potatoes and proceed. Note that there are not .zip
files for all exams. We usually only prepare them after pausing in developing
an exam for a while.
Half-Baked Software, the authors of Hot Potatoes, are planning to abandon
support for HTML output, so I recommend not selecting the "Output to
HTML" (V3) option, but only the "Output to DHTML" (V4) option.
People are welcome to develop their own exams and contribute them to us. But
we ask that you follow these guidelines:
All questions must have a single correct answer that most intelligent
people can agree is correct after studying the reading material offered.
No questions should ask the student to agree with the doctrinal opinions of
the exam author. Questions may only ask about what the opinions are of the
author of the reading material. This includes court opinions, which are always
to be treated as merely the opinions of the judges, and not necessarily
authoritative. The aim is discovery, not indoctrination.
The correct answer should not be obvious. In multiple choice exams, there
should be at least one incorrect answer that is close enough to being correct
that the student must understand a subtle distinction in the reading material,
requiring careful reading.
No questions should depend on knowledge not available in the reading
material presented.
Since exams can be presented in either a fixed question order, or in random
question order, the questions should be composed to be consistent with the mode
chosen. If in random order, the questions should not depend on, or have their
correct answer suggested by, another question. If in fixed order, later
questions should only depend on previous questions and their answers, and
should avoid doing so to the extent possible so that each question is
independent of all the others.
Recommend links to question-specific reading material be inserted with the
"_blank" target option, especially if the material is lengthy, so
that the material comes up in a new window that can be moved or resized.
The selection of reading material, under the "File" menu option,
in the right side frame, is for material that is relevant to all the questions
in the exam, so it should be something all of the questions reference, even if
one or more links to some additional reading material is provided in the
question panel.
If a link to additional reading material is provided in the answer
response, the response should be followed with "To return click on your
browser's BACK button." or equivalent words.
If more than one link to reading material is provided in the question
panel, each should have a brief title. Book titles should be surrounded by
italics tags <I>...</I>, and article titles in quotes.