Automatic generation of personalized answers to a problem set

Teaching and learning statistics and econometrics requires assessment through a problem set (PS). Often the PS requires some statistical analysis of a single database; therefore there is a unique answer. Although a unique answer guarantees the exercise was done correctly, it also facilitates cheating; the lazy student may borrow the answer from his hard-working classmate. This scenario does not guarantee an honest effort and learning. Taking advantage of the automatic generation of documents [Gini, 2006, SJ 6(1)] for a unique PS, I generate a personalized sub-database and answer in a PDF file. The steps are the following. 1) There is a single PS for all students (implying the use of Stata). 2) There is a single / mother database. 3) A personalized (per-student) database is drawn from the mother database. 4) Following Gini(2006) a personalized (per-student) answer is generated into a PDF file. Pros: 1. No opportunity for cheating and copy and paste the same answer without actually running or undertaking the statistical procedure. 2. Lecturer knows the answer beforehand. 3. Ease of grading. 4. Because each student has a different statistical result, forces to undertake individual inference upon the results.