CaTS | Information Technology

Quizzes and Exams

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What are the basics of Quizzes and Exams?

The Quizzes & Exams tool enables you to create and manage points-measured assessments.  You can create and manage quiz questions from the Question Library or the Quizzes & Exams tool, and organize quizzes into categories to make it easier to find assessments with similar or related content. The quiz preview option allows you to test the accuracy of content and grading before you release a quiz. In a preview, you can answer the questions, view allowed hints, submit the quiz, auto-grade answers, read feedback, and view report results.

Creating quizzes for your course involves two basic steps. Each of these steps is described in greater detail in related sections. The basic steps are

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Create your quiz questions. You can create questions in either the Question Library or by importing them from Respondus, a quiz generating software package.

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Create a quiz.  Create a quiz by defining a quiz name and general properties, establishing the quiz restrictions, setting the quiz attempts, creating the submission views and quiz reports, populating the quiz with questions, and setting up the quiz layout.

Quizzes and Exams Playlist

List of Videos in Playlist

To see individual videos in this playlist,

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How do I create a multiple choice quiz?

Multiple-choice questions give students a list of possible answers from which they may choose only one. When you view a list of questions in your quiz, multiple-choice questions are designated with “MC.”

It is strongly recommended that you create all your quiz questions from within the Question Library. This gives you the ability to reuse questions on various quizzes and to create random sections within quizzes. To utilize the Question Library:

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Click the Assessment tab on the course navigation bar and select Quizzes and Exams.

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Click the Question Library link on the Edit Quizzes and Exams screen and the Question Library page displays.

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Select the Multiple Choice question type from the Create New drop-down list.

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When the Multiple Choice Question page appears, enter the question in the Question Text box.  The entry box is a full html editor and you can view more options by clicking on the arrow symbol. Next, you will fill in the answers, select the correct answer, and save your question.

 

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Select Save to save the question and return to the main page; Save and Copy to save the question and create a new question of the same type that retains the copied properties; or, click Save and New to continue creating questions of the same type.

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What does it mean when a quiz is In-Progress?

If students experience difficulty in submitting a quiz in Pilot, then the instructor may need to submit or reset the attempt for them.

Here are the steps:

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From the course homepage, click on Assessments and then on Quizzes and Exams.  This will display the list of tests in the course.

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Click on the down arrow to the right of the quiz title you want to view and select Grade from the menu that appears.

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A list of attempts will display and you need to click on “Show Search Options.

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When the search options appear, change  the “Restrict to” view to “All Users” from the pull-down menu.  To refresh the list, click on the Search icon, the one shaped like a little blue magnifying glass (leave the search field blank).

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When the list of all attempts displays, you will see if the student has an attempt “In Progress.”

Manual insert image: http://blogs.wright.edu/learn/pilotrci/files/2013/03/oie_oie_trim_image.jpg

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If it is in progress, you can impersonate the account to submit the exam by clicking on the impersonate icon or you can click the checkbox to the left of the name and click the trash can icon at the top or bottom of the page to reset the attempt.

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What is Special Access for a quiz?

Do you have students who need extended time on an exam?  Do you have students who need to take the exam before or after the regularly scheduled time?  If so, there is no need to create a separate exam in Pilot for these exceptions.  Instead, you can simply grant the students special access to the existing exam.

To add special access to a quiz…

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Click on the title of the quiz.

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Go to the “Restrictions” tab.

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At the bottom of the Restrictions screen is the “Special Access” area where you can add users for special access.

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Click “Add Users to Special Access

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On the next screen, set the special access properties (e.g., date, Enforced time restrictions, etc.).

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Scroll down and select the student(s) you want to have the special access.

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Click “Add Special Access” at the top or bottom of the page.

The exam will now be available to the selected student at the selected date and time.

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Can a quiz be printed from Pilot?

When making a quiz, sometimes there is nothing as nice as a hard copy when you want to proofread and mark your mistakes. Here are three ways to print a copy of a quiz you created in Pilot.

  • Use Respondus to print the quiz or save it as a Word file.
  • Within Pilot, print the quiz preview.
  • Take the quiz as your demo student, then print that attempt.

Print a Quiz from Respondus

With Respondus software, you can print a quiz or save it to a Microsoft Word file, with or without the answers.

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Assuming you already have the quiz open in Respondus, click the “Preview & Publish” tab at the top, then click “Print Options” at the left. Choose options such as whether you want just the exam, the exam with answers, or just the answers. Then you can view it, save it to a file, or print it.

Respondus is a Windows application for creating quizzes offline. You can download it from ConnectWright. (Be sure to click both “Download” and “Registration Code.”) Also see the Respondus User Guide, a Microsoft Word document.
 

Print a Preview from within Pilot

Within your Pilot Course, you can view a preview of your quiz and print that, if you want. It will only show you the quiz questions, not their answers.

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From the “Assessment” menu, go to “Quizzes & Exams.” Click the downward arrow next to the quiz you want to print. Then click “Preview” followed by “Start Quiz.” Right click somewhere in the column with the quiz content and choose to print just that frame.

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If you have restricted the number of questions that show at one time, you may first want to go to your quiz’s “Layout/Questions” tab, clear the “questions per page” box, the click “Apply” so the quiz will show all questions at once. You can apply your restriction again after you have printed your quiz.

Print a Demo Student Attempt

From within Pilot, you can take the quiz as your demo student. Then you can view that attempt to see and print the questions and answers.

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In the Classlist of most automatically-created courses, you will see a student named something like “demo zzstudent.” Click the downward arrow next to that student’s name and choose to impersonate. Go take the quiz. Then click the demo student’s name at the top right of your screen and click “Restore” To get back to your own faculty identity.

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Now from the “Assessment” menu, go to “Quizzes & Exams.” Click the downward arrow next to the name of the quiz you want to print and choose “Grade.” Then click the demo student’s “attempt” to see and print the quiz and its answers.

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Can I fix a faulty question after students have taken the quiz?

Key Points

  1. If you alter a question in a quiz that some students have already taken, Pilot will preserve the old version of the question for those students who took the quiz before the change.
  2. Only students who take the quiz after you edit a question will see the edited version of the question.
  3. You can reassign points for those who answered the original question. Follow the steps below in the section called Fix the Grades.

How Pilot Handles an Edited Question

When you change a question after some students have already submitted a quiz, the results may seem a little mysterious. In this section, we’ll try to explain Pilot’s behavior. Feel free to skip this explanation and go straight to the next section called Fix the Grades.

When you discover a mistake in your quiz, your first impulse may be to fix the question. That’s perfect. If you’ve marked the wrong answer right, for example, just delete the “100 percent” from the wrong answer and add it to the right answer.

One would think that Pilot should then give credit where credit is due. But this is where things get mysterious.

When you look at your students’ attempts, there’s a scary red message above the changed question. It’s an older version of the question, the message says. You thought you had fixed the question. But inside each student’s attempt, the question hasn’t changed, nor has the student’s score. What gives?

One benefit of the way Pilot handles altered questions is that it helps keep people honest. No one can claim you pulled a switcheroo and altered questions after students answered them. You couldn’t do that if you tried.

There’s an even better benefit, though. Suppose the first students to take your quiz point out that you made a royal mess of one of your questions. So you want to rewrite it before anyone else takes it. You can do that. And you won’t have to worry about how students’ existing answers match the new wording. You can edit until it’s  a whole new question with whole new answers if you want.

Students who take the quiz after you fix the question will get the updated version. Students who took the quiz earlier won’t have their attempt altered. When they, or you, view their submission, Pilot will still show the questions and answers as they were when they took the quiz. In other words, Pilot preserves the integrity of prior submissions.

So it’s only for students who submitted quizzes before you altered the question that you will see the red message about the question being an older version.

That leaves one thing that needs to be fixed: grades for students who took the quiz before you changed the question.

Fix the Grades

Because Pilot preserves the integrity of quizzes already taken, it won’t automatically alter the scores of students who took a quiz before you fixed a question. But it does give you a way to fix the scoring yourself.

You may choose to give everyone who took the old version of the question full credit, for example. Or you may choose to give points only to those who selected a particular answer in the old version of the question. Here’s how.

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From “Assessment” on the navbar, choose “Quizzes and Exams.”

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Click the arrow next to the name of the quiz and choose “Grade.”

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On the “Grade Quiz” page, click the “Questions” tab near the top.

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Select the button in front of “Update All Attempts.”

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Scroll  to the bottom of the list of questions. You may see a section called “Questions that are not in the quiz anymore.” Any question you edited after someone answered it will be listed in this section at the bottom of the page.

Manual insert image: http://blogs.wright.edu/learn/pilotrci/files/2013/06/not-in-quiz-anymore...

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Next, you will click on the question you would like to update. Here you will see the question, it’s answers, and how many people checked each answer. These will only reflect quizzes submitted before you changed the question.

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A little farther down the page, you will see the “Grade” section. Here, you can give all attempts a certain number of points, regardless of which answers were checked. Or you can choose to give points to anyone who chose a particular answer.

When you’ve finished updating the points, make sure you click on the blue Save button. Keep in mind that when you click “Save,” Pilot will only change the scores for quiz attempts submitted before you changed the question.

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You may also need to unpublish, save, then republish the quiz attempts to push the new scores into Grades.

Shortcut: Leave the Question Be

If all your students have taken the quiz before you realize a question has a problem, you can go straight to fixing the points without fixing the question. Follow steps 1 through 4 above. There won’t be a section at the bottom for old versions, though. So just click the question in the main list. You will have the same options to assign points as described in step 7 above.

Of course, if you want to import the quiz into another course, you will need to remember to fix the offending question in your new course before students take the quiz. So it’s probably better to go ahead and fix the question in the original quiz. Then your new course will get the correct version of the question when you import the quiz.

Or Delete the Question

If you delete a question after students have taken the quiz. The existing attempts will have a red message on the question, just like edited questions. The total number of points for the quiz will drop by the point value of the question you delete. But the student’s point scores won’t change, which means they may be higher than they should be. A student’s percentage grade may even exceed 100.

To update students’ scores, you will need to go into each students’ attempt and click the “Auto Grade” button.

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How do I add an image to a quiz question?

Start with an image in png, jpg, or gif format.

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From the question Library (you can also create questions directly in the quiz), click “New” and select the type of question (e.g., Multiple Choice).

Click the entry box in the question editor and enter the question.  To insert the image, click the image icon

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Once the image is added, enter the answer options and check the box to the left of the correct answer and click “Save.”

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Click “Preview”  to view the completed question.

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What are the steps to create a quiz?

Creating quizzes for your course involves two basic steps. Each of these steps is described in greater detail below. The basic steps are

  1. Create your quiz questions. You can create questions in either the Question Library (recommended) or within the quiz.  You can also import properly formatted questions from Respondus, a quiz generating software package.
  2. Create a quiz. Create a quiz by defining a quiz name and general properties, establishing the quiz restrictions, setting the quiz attempts, creating the submission views and quiz reports, populating the quiz with questions, and setting up the quiz layout.
     

 

Create Quiz Questions

It is strongly recommended that you create all your quiz questions from within the Question Library. This gives you the ability to reuse questions on various quizzes and to create random sections within quizzes.

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Click the Quizzes and Exams link under the Assessment tab on the course navigation bar.

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On the next screen, click the Question Library tab and the Question Library page displays.

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Select the applicable question type from the Create New drop-down.

Common features among all quiz question types

The following features apply to all question types in the quizzes tool:

  • All question types have an optional Title field. If you do not enter a title, the system will take the full question text and enter it as the title. The title is only displayed in the quiz tool and not to users taking the quiz.
  • All question types give the option of indicating a Difficulty level. Difficulty levels do not display to the students, but they provide an opportunity to sort questions, regardless of type, by a difficulty level.
  • Many question types give you the option of inserting an image. Click the Insert an Image button to insert an image.
  • All question types provide an opportunity to enter feedback information and question hints.
  • All question types offer a Preview.
  • Once a question is created, click Save to save the question and return to the main page; Save and Copy to save the question and create a new question of the same type that retains the copied properties; or, click Save and New to continue creating questions of the same type.
     

Create a Quiz

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Click on the down arrow for the Assessment tab on the course Navigation bar and select the Quizzes and Exams link.

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When the Manage Quizzes page appears, click on the “New Quiz” tab.

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When the new quiz page appears, enter a Name for the quiz and then select Add/Edit Questions

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On the next screen, click on the “Import” tab.

On the Import screen, there will be three pull-down menus. On the first menu, leave the Import Source as “From an Existing Collection.” From the Source Selection pull-down menu, select “Question Library.”  On the third menu, Source Section, select “Root Collection” to see all of the Question Library or select an individual folder.

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The questions in the Question Library should now appear underneath the selection menus and you can select the questions you want to add to the quiz and then click Save.

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Once the questions have been added to the quiz, you can edit any of them by clicking on the question title. You can change the point values of any questions by clicking on the Edit Values tab. Again, if any changes are made be sure to click on Save.


 

Restrictions

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Next, click on the Restrictions tab to advance to the next screen.

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On the Restrictions page, select start and end dates if you want to make the quiz available during a specific time. You may also set a separate Due Date. Assignments submitted after the Due Date will be flagged as late.

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On the Restrictions page, you can also select the Timing for the quiz to indicate how long the students will have once they start. Please note that a Grace Period has to be set, but it can be as short as a minute or as long as you wish.

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At the top of the Restrictions page is a checkbox to hide the quiz from users. You must uncheck that box for students to see the quiz. But you may want to leave it checked while you work on the quiz.

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There are other options on the Restrictions page that you can set (Security Options, Optional Advanced Restrictions, etc.) and once you are finished, click on Save Quiz and then you can advance to the next tab, Assessment.


 

Assessment Options

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Under the Assessment tab, you can associate the quiz with an item in the Grades. You can either select the grade item from the pull-down menu (if you already have your Grades area complete) or you can click on the “add grade item” link to create a new Grade item.

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If you have the quiz associated with a grade item, you can check the box to “allow automatic export to grades” to have the students’ grades sent to the Grades tool after they complete the quiz.

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You can also check the box to “allow attempt to be set as graded immediately upon completion” if you want the quiz to grade automatically.

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The final option under Assessments is to select how many attempts the students will have for the quiz and, if more than one, choose the grade calculation option. Click Save Quiz when you have made your choices and then proceed to the Submission Views tab.


 

Submission Views: What Students See After They Submit the Quiz

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Under the Submissions Views tab, you can change the Default submission view if you wish (the default submission view is to release just the score for the quiz to the students). If you want the students to see the questions, correct answers, etc., you need to click on the “Default View” link and change the settings accordingly. Click on Save View to save the changes.

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You may also create an additional view. It will override the default view at the time you choose. Many faculty use an additional view to let students see what they got wrong only after the quiz has closed.

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Can I make a copy of an old quiz available for students to review?

Is there a way to copy the Midterm Exam in my course and rename it Midterm Exam Review?  I would like students to collectively retake the exam but I don’t want the results to go to the grade book.

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To make a copy of an exam, go to the Quizzes and Exam tool and click on the “More Actions” tab to select “Copy” (see screenshot).  On the next screen, you will be able to select the exam you want to copy and rename it.  Once the copy is made, adjust the settings and remove any associations to Grades.

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How do I display quiz grades to students?

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To release a quiz grade to students, go to the Quizzes and Exams tool in the course and click on the title of the exam to release.  This will open the properties page, and on this screen click on the “Submission Views” tab.

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On this Submission Views page, click on the “Default View” link.

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and then make the choices for what you wish to release.

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How do I download quiz statistics and reports?

Quiz Statistics

You can save the following for a quiz that has been taken by student:

  • User Statistics – includes students’ quiz scores.
  • Question Statistics – includes average scores by question.
  • Question Details – includes number of times various responses were made for the questions.

Follow the procedure below to export statistics for a quiz:

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Go to the Quiz

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Select Statistics from the drop-down by the quiz name.

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Select the tabbed page for the statistic you wish to export:

  • User Stats – for user statistics
  • Question Stats – for question statistics.
  • Question Details – for question details.
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The results will be displayed. Press the Export to CSV File button near the top.

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When the file is ready to be downloaded, you will have the option to save the file.

Note: The exported file may contain sensitive information such as private student information. Store the file in a secure, password-protected location.
 

Quiz Reports

You can save any of the following types of reports that have been created for a quiz:

  • Question Statistics – includes average scores by question.
  • Question Details – includes number of times various responses were made for the questions.
  • User Statistics – includes students’ quiz scores.
  • Attempt Details – includes questions, responses, and scores for each question of every quiz attempt.
  • User Attempts – includes quiz scores, start times, and completion times of every quiz attempt.

Follow the procedure below to export a report for a quiz:

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Go to the Quiz

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Select Reports from the drop-down by the quiz name.

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A list of available reports your role has access to view will be displayed. Select the link for the report you wish to export.

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Optionally, choose the earliest and latest dates to specify a time period for including attempts in the report. If the report has too much data to export it all at once, try exporting it in portions by date ranges.

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Optionally, press Generate HTML Report to preview the results on your computer, and then press Go Back to Generate Report when ready.

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Press Generate CSV Report.

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When the file is ready to be downloaded, you will have the option to save the file.

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Press Done when finished.

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Can I turn off spell-checking for quizzes?

This page is for people with administrator access.

You must have administrator access to turn off spell checking for quizzes in a course.

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Gear > Config Variable Browser > Tools > Quizzing > ShowSpellCheckInAttempts > Add Value

For “Org Unit ID,” use the number that appears in the course URL. (CRN won’t work.) If you don’t know the ID number, you can click “Select Org Unit” to search by course name.

Change the value to “off” and save.

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How do students see quiz results?

Here is how students see results, such as what questions they got right or wrong. This assumes the instructor has set up the “submission view” to allow students to see more than just their grade.

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Click “Assessment” on the course navbar and choose “Quizzes and Exams.”

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On the Quizzes page, click the little downward-pointing arrow next to the quiz and choose “Submissions.”

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There will be a list of attempts the student submitted for the quiz. Click the attempt to be views, usually “Attempt 1.”

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What the student then sees will depend on the submission view the faculty member has chosen for the quiz.

View and Understand the Submission View (for Learners)

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What are question pools? How do I create them?

Question pools allow you to give students a set number of questions randomly-selected from a larger pool of question. For example, a 25 question quiz could be comprised of questions pulled at random from a pool of 50 questions. Each student would get a unique set of questions. For this reason, creating question pools helps to maintain academic integrity on quizzes and exams.

Note: You can create multiple question pools within a single quiz. This allows you to create a question pool for each topic to ensure that students get a sufficient number of questions for each learning objective that needs to be assessed.

To create a Question Pool:

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After you create a new exam, on the Properties page click on Add/Edit Questions.

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On the next screen, click on Add and then select Question Pool from the menu.

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When the Question Pool screen appears, give the pool a title and click on Browse Question Library.

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On the Question Library page, select the questions you’d like to add and click Import.

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After you click Import, you will return to the page where you added the title and you need to indicate how many questions you want to randomize in the exam. If you want to just scramble the order of all of the questions, then enter the the same number as there are questions. You then need to add the point value for the questions (all questions in a Question Pool must have the same point value).

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The final step is to click Save. You should now return to properties page of the exam and the questions and the total point value should be displayed.

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If you want additional random pools in the exam, just repeat the steps above.

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