Series:
MCQ5 is the other half of Dr Nick Tan's pair of programs for self teaching on the Series 5 (see Quiz5). This version is shareware and if you want to continue to use it you have to pay the £15 to do so (although there is a special offer until the end of August).
Installing MCQ5 is relatively simple although there are extra files to place in opx and OPL folders which may confuse those new to the Psion. Once loaded a simple click from your extras bar and you are presented with Nicks rather garish title screen. Nick has supplied some suitable questions to get you're teeth into. The questions, I am sure most of you who have had to suffer that lazy way of examining, are multiple choice with five stems. After reading the questions and five stems you are asked to enter your five true/false "guesses"(Guesses !! they are carefully worked out and balanced answers!).
Once you have had enough you can then check you're score helpfully provided with a little comment depending on how well or badly you have done. If you should get bored of the questions provided there is the ability to write the questions yourself which is a relatively straightforward procedure once you get used to how questions are structured.
Overall this is a well constructed program with few problems. A continuing score would be nice but not essential, perhaps if Nick was feeling manic a bit of AI which would remember those that you got wrong and retest you again. Again the weakness with this program is the lack of questions. Creating new MCQs is a tiresome business and presumably copying others is plagiarism and is bound to break copyright law. However if a group of like-minded citizens got together and wrote questions for each other then this would be an excellent learning tool. I know there are MCQs on the internet but I don't think there is an MCQ format (e.g. like the .puz format for crosswords).
Overall a very competent program from Dr Tan and definitely worthwhile if you have the access to questions. I look forward to further innovative programming
