The editor is Graeme Hart and the moderators are Computer Facility, Pam Andrew, Peter McTigue and Michael Nott. The principle project of the Engineering Faculty's Multimedia Support Programmer, NEST allows novices to the World Wide Web to write exams, questionnaires and quizzes that test students, gather data and generate reports. Currently, users of NEST must be postgraduate students or staff and hold DECR accounts. This applies to both NEST document authors and their intended audience.
Authors can specify answers and marking schemes for questions and then enjoy a list of user results.
Users themselves get their own marks back with explanations, but only their marks. Marks are graphed in a normal distribution and other basic statistics are given. For questionnaires, frequency and summary tables are searchable. The software has been used to run ten examinations for various Engineering departments and is currently in use gathering 1000 responses to a twenty-item questionnaire. NEST runs in PERL, but writes C code for better on-line performance.