QTI

The IMS QTI ( Question and Test Interoperability ) consortium specification defines a standard format for presenting test items, scores and results, supporting the exchange of materials between authoring systems, within systems, backup storage sources, and other automated training systems. The format allows the exchange of materials, guaranteeing their invariability and unambiguous interpretation. The purpose of the format was to ensure interoperability between systems.

As automated knowledge control systems began to develop at an extraordinary pace, the question of an exchange language describing questions and tasks came to the fore. The task of using this language is to enable the author of a test task prepared in one system to easily transfer it to another system. High-quality test tasks are very time-consuming to write and verify, therefore, the presence of a standard language for describing test tasks will guarantee the possibility of further work with it.

The specification contains a data model that defines the structure of the questions, the assessment and the results of the questions together in XML data format. Most often, the specification is used to describe questions. In the evaluation part and part of the results, the specification is used much less frequently.

The first version of QTI (1.0) was created on the basis of the QML ( Questions Markup Language ) format developed by QuestionMark, but the language is developing and can now be used to describe any test task (QML is still used by Questionmark and created for backward compatibility in tools like Adobe Captivate ).