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Properties: *Best Practices for Assessment Properties

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Assessment Properties: Best Practices

Title/Description/Item Visibility

The first option is to decide if you want to change the name of the assessment and whether to show or hide an assessment from Students.

Grade Book Column Name

Decide what you want the column in your grade book to be called. As shown, this can be different. TIP: The shorter the Grade Book column name, the better.

Question Delivery

The next area you will need to decide on is how you want the students to receive the assessment. You have three options:

 

1. All the questions at once,
2. The questions presented one at a time where you can revisit previous questions, and
3. The questions presented one at a time where the previous questions cannot be revisited.

The second or third option, depending on if you want the students to be able to change their answers, is recommended for a couple of reasons. First, the students cannot print out the page with all the questions at once, which they could if all the questions were displayed at the same time. Second, this also benefits people that use a screen reader to view the page. The cursor will jump to the top of the page when you click save and if you are showing all the questions at once, the screen reader will have to go through all the questions again to get to the question that has not been answered yet.

For Display Question Titles, decide if you want the name of the question to be viewed by the students. This is usually not recommended since many people name their questions with the answer. This could also be confusing if you are using question sets. The question titles will not be in any type of order when randomly drawing from a question set. This will also give the students an easy way to cheat. If they know the name of the question it would be easier to ask other students what the answer is.

Display Assessment

Choose whether to have the assessment open in a new window, which is helpful to learners if you want them to navigate your course while taking a quiz, survey, or self-test. If pop-up blockers is a big issue with your students, have the assessment display in the same window as the course.

Duration

The next area you need to decide on is the duration of the assessment. You can choose unlimited if the time limit is not important. But, if the time is important you can choose anywhere from 1 minute to several days. It is recommended that you give the students a little more than a minute a question for objective tests. For example, if you have a test that is 50 multiple-choice questions, you may want to give them 60 minutes. It completely depends on the type of question it is and how difficult the questions are. It may take a couple of semesters to determine the perfect time period.

If it is important that the students do not get more time than your allotted time to take the assessment, you need to check the box next to Disallow answer submission if time has expired. If you do not check this box, students will have the opportunity to finish the assessment past the allotted time. You will know when this has occurred because the grade will be red instead of black in the assessment submissions area. If you do not check the box, you would have to go back into each submission to take off the points for the questions that were answered after the time limit, if you choose to do so. For further clarification of this option, If time has expired, students can submit the quiz with the answers they saved within the timeframe; however, they cannot save any new answers after the time has expired.

 

Attempts

The next area within the settings are the randomization settings. You first need to decide how many times you are going to allow the students to take the assessment. If you only want them to take it once, then the rest of the questions in this area can be ignored, but if you want more than one, you must answer the next three questions.

  1. The first question is whether you want each attempt to have different answers picked from the question set. If you are not using question sets, than you do not have to worry about this. If you are using question sets, you need to decide if this is important. Do you want the students to get the same questions or another random selection for the additional attempts? If you want this, you must select the check box next to Randomize questions in a question set for each attempt.
     
  2. The second question is to decide if you want any time between the student's attempts. This can range from one minute to days. It is suggested that you include at least one minute separation.
     

  3. If multiple attempts are allowed, display the score of the following attempt as the Student's grade: decide which graded attempt do you want to accept. You have the options of First, Last, Highest, or Average. Be careful with Last, because if someone accidentally opens the wrong assessment and closes it out without doing anything, it could give them a "0" for that attempt, which will be the last attempt. Highest or Average are the choices that are suggested.

Student Score

You have five choices.

  1. Release the score after the assessment has been submitted. This allows students to "View Results" when they have finished to see what they made on the assessment.
     
  2. Release the score after the assessment has been submitted and all of the questions have been graded. This is important if you have a paragraph question that you want to have graded before the students see their grade. If you use the first setting and you have a paragraph question then the students will get a partial score until you have the paragraph question graded.

  3. Release the score after the availability period has ended. If the assessment contains question types that can be automatically graded, release the assessment score to each Student after the End Time has passed.

  4. Release the score after the availability period has ended and all of the questions have been graded. If the assessment contains question types that must be manually graded by the Section Instructor, such as paragraph questions, release the assessment score to each Student only after the End Time has passed and the Section Instructor has graded all of the questions.

  5. Do not release the score. This setting is used if you want to look at the grades and statistics before releasing to the students. In addition, this setting can also be used if you have made the assessment available for a longer period of time and you do not want students to use the wisdom of someone else before they take the test.

If multiple attempts are allowed, display the score of the following attempt as the Student's grade: decide which graded attempt do you want to accept. You have the options of First, Last, Highest, or Average. Be careful with Last, because if someone accidentally opens the wrong assessment and closes it out without doing anything, it could give them a "0" for that attempt, which will be the last attempt. Highest or Average are the choices that are suggested.

Statistics Release

Specify if assessment statistics should be released to Students. Enabling this option allows students to compare their scores and results with the rest of the class.

Goals

Specify if you want to associate goals that students should achieve as a result of taking this assessment.

 

Part 3:

There are five areas under More Options.

Dates Available:

This area allows you to set the start and end day and time for the assessment. If you do not change anything, the assessment will be open all the time. If you only want to give a range of dates and times where the student can take the assessment, you must set the start and end day/time, as shown below. If you want the course system to create an event in the calendar that corresponds to this date you can select the check box next to Create a corresponding event in the Calendar.

TIPS:

  • End Time indicates when a Student can no longer access the assessment. However, if the Student starts the quiz before the End Time, they are allowed the full duration to complete the assessment.
     
  • If you set a start and end date/time for the quiz to a later date, make sure you select the Show Item option for Item Visibility. Otherwise, students will not see the quiz, even once it becomes available on the date/time you specified.
     

 

Results Properties:

The results properties area allows you to make feedback available to the students. This includes the actual question and answers, both yours and the students, any feedback that you included during the question creation, the student's score for each question, the student's total score for the assessment, and the grader comments. One option that you have is to turn all the results off except for the total score, then when everyone has taken the assessment you can go back to this area and check the boxes of what you want them to see.

If you release the score to students, determine what you want your students to see:

  • The Show the question text checkbox must be selected for any subordinate checkboxes to be selected.
     
  • If you select the Show the student's response for each question checkbox, you must also select one of the following:
    • Show the percentage value of the Student's answer: if the question requires a multiple-part answer, this setting shows the percentage awarded to each part of the answer.
    • Show the correct answer.
    • Show the correct answer AND the percentage value of the Student's answer.
       
  • Show the feedback for each question: show feedback, if any, from the person who created the question.
     
  • Show the Student's score for each question: show the score awarded for each of the Student's answers.
     
  • Show the Student's total score for the assessment: show the total score awarded for the assessment.
     
  • Show the grader comments for the assessment: show a comment, if any, from the person who marked the assessment.

You can also have the results e-mailed to you or someone that is working with you by including the e-mail address in the box next to E-mail results to. Only the total score is e-mailed; individual responses and question scores are not included. If the assessment contains paragraph questions, you must grade them before the e-mail is sent.

 

Submission Properties:

The submission settings allows you to include a message that the students will see once they finish their assessment. You can also have a copy of the students' submissions e-mailed to you or someone that is working with you. For E-mail submissions, only a student’s response to each question is sent.  The total score and the score for each question are not included.

TIP: Sometimes a student might argue that “Vista changed my answers.”  Use both the E-mail Results and E-mail Submissions options as proof that the answers the student selected at the time of submission is what you see. You could even e-mail them their submission as proof.

Security Properties:

Use these options if you plan to administer the quiz in a proctored environment.  If you want to control where students take an exam, reserve a computer lab or test center on campus and obtain the computers’ IP address information from the lab coordinator.  Entering this information in the quiz settings will prevent students from taking the exam anywhere else but in that lab or test center.

An IP address uniquely identifies every computer that communicates over the Internet. An IP address is written as four numbers separated by periods. For example: 192.168.1.0

If you want to use an IP address mask to define a range of valid IP addresses that are allowed to access the assessment, enter it. To set the IP address mask, you must also set the IP address.

  • In the IP address text boxes, enter the complete IP address of one machine or node on your network that is allowed to access the assessment. For example: 192.168.1.0
     
  • In each of the IP address mask text boxes, enter one of the following:
    • 0 to indicate the number that must match the corresponding number in the IP address box.
    • 255 to indicate any number in the range of 0 to 254 is allowed.

For example: if the IP address were set to 192.168.1.0, and the IP address mask were set to:

  • 0.0.0.255, then all IP addresses in the range of 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.254 can access the assessment, a total of 255 users.
  • 0.0.255.255, then all users with addresses in the range of 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.1.245 can access the assessment, a total of 65025 users.

IMPORTANT: If you want to restrict access to an assessment by IP address, you should contact your network administrator for assistance.

Custom Instructions:

Enter instructions that appear when Students begin the assessment.  These instructions appear at the top of the assessment window.

Display custom assessment instructions on every question when questions are delivered one at a time: select if you want to display the instructions with every question. If you do not select this option, instructions are displayed with the first question only. Note: This setting is available only if you selected the option to deliver one question at a time.