Teachers, rejoice. A team of Penn State researchers has developed a way to make multiple-choice exam questions easier for instructors to create, yet more intellectually challenging for test-takers. Utilizing machine-learning ranking models, the researchers have proposed a method that automatically generates "distractors," which are the alternative options used to distract students from the correct answer in a multiple choice question.

You’ve likely heard of hot hands or hot streaks — periods of repeated successes — in sports, financial markets and gambling. But do hot streaks exist in individual creative careers? A team of researchers, including two from Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology, examined the works of nearly 30,000 scientists, artists and film directors to learn if high-impact works in those fields came in streaks.