Patent ID: 7516180

Claim:
A system for connecting a plurality of computing systems to a single network, the system comprising: a plurality of client workstations; a control unit configured to monitor the operation of the plurality of client workstations; and a communications network that facilitates transmission of data and commands between the control unit and the plurality of client workstations, the communications network being a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) based communications network; wherein the control unit comprises: a test question database containing test questions; and an instructor question authoring system (IQAS) module that: (i) during creation of a test, automatically calculates, for each of the test questions, a weight that indicates an expected difficulty of the test question; and (ii) enables a user of the control unit to select ones of the test questions for inclusion in the test based on the weights; a test question module that retrieves test questions in the test from the test question database for presentation to users of the client workstations; and a testing module that initiates the test by transmitting, via the communications network, the test questions in the test to the client workstations in response to input from the user of the control unit; wherein the client workstations are configured such that when the client workstations receive the questions, the client workstations present the questions to the users of the client workstations independent of the activities performed by the users of the client workstations; wherein each of the plurality of client workstations accepts responses from the users of the client workstations to the questions presented; wherein each of the plurality of client workstations provides to the control unit status of the responses received from the users of the client workstations to the test questions; wherein the control unit is configured to present an interface to the user of the control unit; wherein the interface displays, for each of the users of the client workstations, a status that indicates whether the user of the client workstation is logged in, which of the questions the user of the client workstation has answered, and a score for the questions that the user of the client workstation has answered; and wherein the control unit is configured to update the interface in real-time as the responses are received from the plurality of client workstations.