The following commands allow you to specify additional information and can be entered in any order in the question header. Upper and lower case letters are not distinguished within a header.

A — Single character answers can be entered in the question header instead of following an answer header. For example, if the correct answer to a multiple choice question is ‘b’ it would be preceded by an ‘A’ for answer and indicated in the question header as follows:

\MC C 1 Q 1 A b

D — Difficulty Level

K — Key Word

Difficulty Level and Key Word values may be specified as a letter from 'a' to 'z' or as a number from 1 to 52 and can be defined in MicroTest Pro from the Edit menu. Difficulty Levels and Key Words apply to only a single question. A question header with a Difficulty Level of ‘a’ and Key Word coded as ‘b’ would appear as follows:

\MC C 1 Q 1 D a K b

P — Prefix

S — Suffix

MicroTest Pro uses Prefix and Suffix information in your question header to locate multiple choice and matching choice lines. Both the Prefix and Suffix can contain up to 5 characters including spaces and should be enclosed by quotes. For example, if your choices are in the following format,

A. choice 1
B. choice 2

this would be indicated in the question header as follows:

\MC C 1 Q 1 S “.”

If your choices are in the following format,

(a) choice 1
(b) choice 2

the Prefix and Suffix would be indicated in the following manner:

\MC C 1 Q 1 P “(“ S “)”

The Prefix and Suffix commands apply to all subsequent questions until specified otherwise.

SC — The Scramble command specifies which choices are to be scrambled in a multiple-choice question. The options are All (the initial default), None, a letter or a number. All and None apply to the current and all subsequent questions except those in which a particular number or letter is specified. The All or None state is used until another All or None option changes it. All or None can be used in a header along with another scramble option to specify a particular choice for that question, for example:

\MC SC all SC d

If there were five choices in this question, only the first four would be scrambled.

Other examples are:

\MC SC a  The abbreviation for All is ‘a’ so all choices could be scrambled.

\MC SC 0 The zero indicates that no choices would be scrambled.

\MC SC 3 The ‘3’ indicates that the first three choices would be scrambled.

\MC SC c The ‘c’ indicates that the first three choices would be scrambled.

For more information about scrambling multiple choice questions, see the Multiple Choice Scrambling Feature under Multiple Choice Template .

U — UseLineBreaks. Line breaks will remain as they appear in the import file.

R — RemoveLineBreaks. MicroTest Pro will remove non-consecutive line breaks that are not followed by one or more spaces.

The default option (initial setting) is UseLineBreaks. Line breaks can also be referred to as carriage returns, return characters, or paragraph marks. The line breaks command should be specified separately for each of the three applicable header types (question, answer, and explanation).

The RemoveLineBreaks feature is particularly useful if you are importing text from a structured format which has return characters at the end of each line. In such cases, it enables you to connect these lines into paragraphs which are automatically word wrapped as margins are adjusted.

When RemoveLineBreaks is selected, MicroTest Pro will remove line breaks from all lines except (1) an empty line, (2) a line that is immediately followed by an empty line or (3) a line that is immediately followed by a line that begins with one or more spaces. These exceptions enable the preservation of indented charts or tables, indented paragraphs, and paragraphs that are separated by a blank line.

Spaces preceding a removed return character are also deleted but MicroTest Pro ensures that a space separates the last word on one line and the first word on the appended line. If a hyphen is the last non-space character on a line, it is removed and the hyphenated word is joined as a single word.