The Canadian firm Maplesoft produces a wide range of software including the wellknown interactive mathematical software Maple now in version 10. Its Maple TA (MTA) is an online assessment system capable of handling most assessment tasks but particularly designed for the assessment of mathematics where it can call on the power of its Maple engine to probe deeper knowledge and understanding.
Earlier this year the University of Warwick signed up for a 3-month trial of MTA with the UK distributor Adept Scientific as part of a 2-year project to promote the take-up of Computer-Aided Assessment (CAA) in the Science Faculty. Initially we tried to get MTA running on a Solaris server here (it runs on most standard platforms) but this failed perhaps because our server was already configured to handle other applications and we didn’t have enough expert staff time to persevere. We then moved to a hosted service provided by Adept Scientific and subsequently used MTA in tandem with Question Mark Perception (QMP) for a summative multiple-choice test in an elementary Number Theory module with 166 registered second-year mathematics students: MTA for 66 students in one venue and simultaneously QMP for the remaining 100 in another. This experience gave a useful comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the two systems and formed the basis of our decision to buy a 12-month MTA licence for 500 students in the coming academic year.
The author of this review and an IT-savvy research student in the Engineering School cooperated in authoring and organising the above-mentioned test and this review should be seen as a preliminary and surface judgement based mainly on this limited experience. Now that we have a licence I hope to push the software closer to its technical and pedagogical limits next year in a series of summative tests (for the same number theory module) that explore MTA’s sophisticated functionality more fully. I hope then to be in a position to write a more searching evaluation for MSOR Connections based on that experience.
