The life cycle of questions used in basic IT training can be divided into several periods:

preparation for a test,
delivery of a test,
test results assessment,
assessment of test quality,
entering feedback into the base

    Preparation for a test
 The preparation starts before the active life of a test when the author of a test is still developing questions. IT provides authors with support or tools for easier development of questions, correction, gathering information, administration and saving this information into a data base. Individual questions should be reviewed and graded by a board consisting of several professors (at least three).

 Active life of a question starts with its introduction into an actual test. The selection of questions to enter a test can be done by a professor before the test or a system which generates tests automatically by random or some other selection mode. The new feature that IT makes possible is dynamic generation of a test during the examination, according to some previously set patterns. Tests generated that way are unique for every tested person or group. The existing IT offers a large number of tools which support all phases of the test preparation and the maintenance of question data base.

     Delivering a test
 The next phase is the delivery of a test i.e. creating an interface between the questions and the student. Interface collects the answers to be evaluated. It can be a classic paper form. Other than that, an exam can be conducted directly on a computer (e.g. in a computer laboratory), in which case the answers are stored in a file, and e-mail to the professors or an exam data base. An exam can also be conducted online from a central server. Before the results are published several things should be done: evaluate the quality of individual questions and, if necessary, introduce changes into the test as well as the results.

     Test results evaluation
 The last phase is evaluation in which the system classifies the answers as correct or incorrect, adds them up, grades them, publishes the results to the students and stores the data in a base. Reading the results from paper forms can be done reliably by a scanner. If the results are in an electronic format, interpretation is simple and fast, so the results can be obtained almost immediately.

    Assessment of the test quality
 Before publishing the results it is recommendable to conduct the evaluation of the test quality or the so called item analysis, and, if necessary, correct the results. 
 
    Entering feedback into a base
After a test is conducted, all gathered feedback should be entered into a data base, and the data about the quality of the test forwarded to its author.