Creating practice exam papers in OCR’s Exambuilder can be incredibly time-consuming. However, this simple hack can save you a significant amount of time. And when I say ‘hack,’ I don’t mean anything improper—I mean a clever time-saving method!
Automating Question Selection
Instead of manually adding questions to an exam paper, you can automate the process where from your category selection, all questions are added automatically or 10 questions are picked at random. Sounds neat, right?
It’s surprising that OCR hasn’t introduced a built-in feature for this, but perhaps usability improvements will come as they transition to the new Teach Cambridge Platform. In the meantime, here’s how you can do it yourself.
Steps to Automate Question Selection
Step 1: Open the Browser Console
Open the console in your web browser. In Chrome, press Ctrl + Shift + I to access Developer Tools. If this doesn’t work, your IT department may have disabled it, so you may need to use a personal device.
Step 2: Enable Pasting
Type allow pasting into the console and hit Enter.
Security Warning: Never paste code into the console unless you understand what it does!
Step 3: Run the Code
To automatically add all questions for a selected category, paste the following code into the console and press Enter. It may seem like nothing is happening at first, but after a few seconds, the questions will be added as if by magic to your exam paper.
$('body').find('[data-questionid]').each(function() {window.create_playlist.addQuestionToMyPlaylists($(this).attr('data-questionid'))})To add 10 random questions, use this code instead:
var qIDs = []; $('body').find('[data-questionid]').each(function() {qIDs.push($(this).attr('data-questionid'))}); qIDs.sort(() => Math.random() - 0.5); for(let i=0;i<10;i++) {window.create_playlist.addQuestionToMyPlaylists(qIDs[i])};Final Thoughts
At some point, OCR may update Exambuilder in a way that prevents this trick from working, but until then, take advantage of it to save valuable time!
