The Progress Test Medizin (PTM) provides students with regular feedback on their current level of knowledge and its development throughout their studies.
PTM tests are administered every academic semester to around 10,000 students in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since PTM tests consist of 200 questions from all fields of medicine, each test cycle generates about two million data points.

1. The purpose of this project is to research the extent to which regular, content-related response patterns of students can be identified and characterised through the use of machine learning techniques; the question of whether the curricula of participating faculties could be somehow inferred using such methods will also be explored.
2. The outcomes of this research might eventually make it easier to provide students and faculties with more accurate feedback on their educational improvement.
3. Test questions will be subject to semantic processing with NLP algorithms; the results of this treatment should help improve feedback design and also facilitate test assembling by supplying optimised descriptions for prospective test questions.
4. Which kind of feedback do students prefer? It must not be forgotten that formative and summative exams do not share the same communication priorities in this regard.
5. The transfer of knowledge and methodological approaches will be tested in a model project to be carried out within the context of a Computer Science faculty.