January 2006: four enhancements (version change to 5.6)

 

While most were out celebrating the arrival of yet another new year, there was no rest at Lertap central. Some substantial changes have been made.

 

Response similarity analysis, RSA

 

Enhanced work in this area started July last year.  Now Lertap produces three reports for looking at the matter of suspect cheating, with an important probability index, "Sigma", added to help put the heat on a cheat.  To find out more you'd want your mouse to nibble here.

 

Lertap breaks down

 

What's this? A break down? Nope; just had to get your attention. There's now a new option on the Run menu which will break out results by groups.

 

Say people have sat your test on chemistry at five different campuses of your university.  You have coded test venue into one of the columns on the Data sheet.  The new option to "Breakout scores by groups" will quickly produce a "Breaks" table with test results organized by group levels, and a spiffy graph to match, "PlotBreaks".

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Read more. Plus: have a look at growing whiskers immediately below.

 

Box your whiskers?

 

The Shorts menu also sports a new option: "Make box and whiskers from Breaks."  Once you've got one of the spiffy new Breaks tables mentioned in the previous paragraph, this option will make a copy of the table, and reformat it so that it will suit one of Excel's built-in options for plotting the performance of your stocks.

 

Don't have any stocks?  No matter.  Excel doesn't really realize what it's plotting; the "stock performance" graph which results comes usefully close to being a real boxplot, and it certainly has whiskers.

 

Burma shave?

 

The histogrammer now uses improved grammer

 

The good old line-printer-compatible histogrammer from Lertap 2 days, a favorite of many (well, at least some), is now smarter, being capable of plotting the scores found on three different Lertap reports sheets: Scores, Breaks, and RSAsig. Have a squiz.

 

Use this with the Shorts menu option to "Make a histogram chart", an option introduced Sep 05, and you'll wow your audience for sure.