AI-Driven question generation: Streamlining exam creation for Optimum Assessment

Optimum Assessment is a leading organization in the Netherlands specializing in the development of cutting-edge assessment platforms. Their solutions are trusted by major national institutions such as the Dutch Central Bureau for Driving Licenses (CBR), the Education Executive Agency (DUO), and the Dutch Tax Administration (Belastingdienst). Prior to this collaboration, CloudNation had already supported Optimum Assessment at a DevOps level, ensuring their Azure environment was fully optimized.

For Optimum Assessment's clients, the process of manually creating high-quality exam questions was time-consuming and labor-intensive, with risks including question leakage and limited content variety. This manual approach posed challenges in maintaining the security and diversity of exam content and constrained the ability to scale question generation efficiently.

To address these needs, CloudNation and Optimum Assessment developed an AI-driven question generation solution using retrieval-augmented generation. This solution automates the creation of multiple-choice questions based on keywords specified by the exam author, enhancing both speed and accuracy. By analyzing the context around specified keywords, the AI solution produces plausible but incorrect answer options alongside a single correct answer, generating questions that are secure and contextually relevant. The solution also supports adjustable language levels and tones, allowing questions to be tailored to different user requirements.

The implemented AI solution has streamlined question creation for Optimum Assessment's platform, empowering exam authors to quickly generate a large, diverse bank of questions with minimal manual input. This process significantly reduces the time required for question development (from development to moderation), allowing for rapid scaling while enhancing exam integrity by generating multiple variants of each question. 

The project was completed in just ten days, leveraging the following Microsoft Azure technologies:

• Azure OpenAI for generating questions and plausible distractors (incorrect answers).
• Azure AI Search for vectorized data storage and retrieval, allowing for fast access to contextually relevant content.
• CosmosDB for efficient metadata management, providing organized, scalable data access.
• Azure Functions for automating document processing and storage, enabling seamless scalability and workflow automation.

This robust AI-powered solution has transformed Optimum Assessment’s question generation process, setting a new standard in efficiency and security for exam question development.

If you're interested in the technical specifics of this solution, please contact us or reach out to Optimum Assessment directly at www.optimumassessment.com.