Probably you all remember the numerous tests you have taken in school - multiple choice, yes/no answers, cause/effect, fill in the gaps, and many more types of exercises have been used to evaluate your knowledge. And I don't know about you, but I've always wondered when teachers found the time to come up with all those questions and how they selected the most efficient method for a specific subject.

Growing up, I started taking fewer tests, but the curiosity remained - until a few days ago, when I came across Teach2000, an easy-to-use application that helps you produce tests within minutes. So, probably teachers were using this software for their evaluations, but I need to analyze it closer to see if it is that efficient.

The pleasant surprises began when I wanted to install Teach2000 since it revealed a multilingual installer (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish) that will help you 'exploit' the application even if your native language is not English (like most of other similar tools). In case you change your mind, you will be offered another chance of changing the interface language when actually launching the application. Also, in order to make sure that you will use Teach2000 as efficiently as it was meant to be, you can use the tip of the day - sure, you can disable this feature if it gets on your nerves, but for the inexperienced users, these pieces of advice will be a real goldmine.

Moving along, I tried to actually devise a test, and I had to choose between several alternatives, because you specialize the questions: normal (the classical question/answer test), multiple choice, multiple choice with multiple answers, yes/no answers or grammar. The first four types are common to all kinds of tests, no matter the subject, so I selected the grammar type. It will require you to specify the language you want to use, then it will help you create a test using its vocabulary.

Reaching this point, you simply need to input the questions and the correct answers, having the liberty of entering a secondary answer for a certain question. When you have finished creating the test, you can preview it just by selecting the 'Test' tab (this action will start a timer and will display the first question). According to the level of difficulty you require, you can choose the match type, meaning you can ignore letter case, punctuation marks, accents, spaces or even word order.

Furthermore, you have the possibility to opt for a repetition type or a certain question selection, e.g. to display errors and previously mistaken questions, or use only the newly added entries. Also, in order to adapt Teach2000 to your precise needs, you will be able to choose several types of smiley faces (to encourage your students) or use the speech and sounds to evaluate pupils' knowledge.

The Good
Besides the multitude of supported languages that will surely be useful to a lot of teachers worldwide, the numerous question types will also satisfy the general teaching requirements.

In addition, you can always be sure that no typo will appear within your tests due to the spell checker, a tool that will enable you to choose a language for the test questions and another one for the answers (the dictionaries are not very comprehensive, but you can improve them by adding words). And you can be sure your work will not be in vain because Teach2000 will prompt you to save your project when attempting to close it.

The Bad
I have to be honest and to admit that I did not find any major drawbacks to Teach2000. However, the interface could use some brushing up and maybe all those abundant functions can be structured in more than just two tabs. A rookie (or even intermediate) user can easily get overwhelmed by all the features and won't know what to settle for.

The Truth
All in all, Teach2000 will turn out to be a very good tool for building tests of all kinds. It is free, flexible enough to be used with any subject, and it can be customized according to the age or knowledge level of your students. Assuming you won't get distracted by all the elements and you know exactly what you need, Teach2000 will definitely gain your appreciation and will help you save time when the evaluation period approaches (and none of your students will realize you have a virtual assistant).

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: