Using Microsoft office to generate individualized tasks for students

The use of so-called 'drill and practice' exercises is almost universal in elementary statistics courses. Even in higher education, where there is easy access to statistical computer packages, many teachers still consider that there is an educational benefit in students using hand calculation to work through simple examples on topics such as the Normal distribution or linear regression. Such exercises are particularly attractive for teachers to set as home work assignments since they tend to have unique numerical answers, making them much quicker to mark than more open-ended tasks where students engage in discussion of their results. Regrettably the exercises are equally attractive to minority of lazy students who can happily copy the solutions of a more diligent but weak-willed colleague. The purpose of this article is not to debate the relative merits of such assignments, but merely to facilitate the setting of individualized tasks to combat the increasing problem of plagiarism. Simonite et al. (1998) describe a similar approach, but their method involves Visual Basic macros, which require a substantially higher technical capability than the method described here.<br>This article describes how the mail merge facility within Microsoft Word can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Excel to generate personalized assignments for students at all levels.