Category Archives: tests

Need to regrade a finished quiz?

Teaching, tests, tutorial, Uncategorized

If you realized after the fact that a quiz/exam assessment had an error – just fixing the question will let you know that it will only affect future users who take the exam.  You should still correct it there, but in order to regrade, we need to do something else.

Go to the Exams/Quizzes area.  Find the assessment that had the problem.  Click on the dropdown menu to the right of the name of the assessment.  Click on Grade.

 

 

 

Now click on Questions

Check the radio button for Update all attempts.  Find the Question that had an issue.

Clicking on the question will give you a break down of how it was answered and shows what was graded as correct.

Here you can choose whether to give every one points, or just give points to the people who answers in the desired manner.

Click Save.

 

Brightspace Grading Columns – Part 1

Teaching, tests, tutorial, , , , , , , , , , ,

Setting up an organized gradebook isn’t the same as in Blackboard.  If you are used to Bb, there are going to be some headaches and confusion.

Some things are organizationally nice.  For example, you can assign items to belong to grading categories, and they stay grouped that way in the grading spreadsheet.  Not only that, but items in a grading category will get a subtotal column auto created for you, which I think can be particularly helpful if you are keeping track of attendance in your gradebook. (Note: the attendance tool in Brightspace does not report into the grade book. This is something I manually setup.)

To create new categories or items (columns), you will want to go to “Grades” -> “Manage Grades” and then “New”.

To decide on your categories, you should refer to your course syllabus.  You should have something like:

Class Participation/Attendance – 15%
Quizzes – 20%
Midterm – 20%
Project(s) – 25%
Final – 20%

You can see that every item listed that has multiple items nested (Class Participation/Attendance, Quizzes and possibly Project(s)) will be your categories.  Since there will only be one midterm and one exam, you cou hold them as just singleton items that are not in a category, OR you could make a category called exams and add them both to that.

First make the Categories, then the Items inside the categories.

Since you indicated in the Category that all items would have a total value of 100, the maximum points fills in automatically for all associated items and is a graded out field.

Resulting spreadsheet with grades filled in:

Note: I manually filled in these grades and you are able to do that.  If you want these grades to auto populate from an actual brightspace exam, you will want to go to your Exams/Quizzes area from the NavBar and create or find the exam you want to use, and associate it with the right Grade Item.  

Warning: This is one of the places where Brightspace can be … shall be say, confusing?   When you go to edit your exam/quiz, you will see this:

That Category pull down… even though. yes, we were just calling things items and categories in the Manage Grades area, has NOTHING to do with categories in Grades.

Instead, you will want to switch to the Assessment tab and find the pull down for Grade Item.

If you haven’t already setup the Items in your grade book, you do have an opportunity to select [add grade item] and throw in the item into an existing category.

Now it knows that this Quiz is  from the Category “Exams” and will grade it and submit it into the grade spreadsheet appropriately. It also knows that it will be worth up to 100 points and will be equally weighted with the other exams to the 20% total value of the final grade, because that is how  the category Exams is setup.

End of Part 1

 

 

 

 

 

importing questions to a question library in brightspace

Teaching, tests, tutorial, , , ,

https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/KBL931001391

The question library is where you keep the myriad questions that you will use when creating assessments.

They can be moved from one course to another using the course import/export tool under course admin.

“Are you looking for a way to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library? Look no further than this handy Quiz Question Converter- now available through the Brightspace Community on the Learning Center!”

 

 

All Those Test Options in Blackboard & How to Give a Synchronous Test*

assessment, Keep Teaching, Teaching, tests, tutorial, , , , ,

This blog entry is going to focus on the options in Blackboard that have to do with the timing of an test.

When you are first creating the Test.. these options are found under the Test Information area and span a few sections.  If you have already made the test you can find these options by clicking the chevron next to the test name and clicking “Edit the Test Options”.

Force Completion


When you set this option, if the student looses the connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be unable to go back and finish the test. (Without you having to intervene anyway.)  We don’t recommend enabling this setting.

Set Timer

This option gives the student a visible countdown timer during the test. It begins after the test description and instructions have been displayed. If Auto-Submit  is selected, at the end of the count down, it ends the test, no matter where they were.  If Auto-Submit is not checked, you will see an exclamation point in the grade center and have the option to adjust the grade, if they went long.

If the Force Completion is not set, and a student looses their connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be able to continue taking the test, and the timer will continue from when it initially started. (eg., If they loose the connection for 10 minutes, they loose that 10 minutes.)

Display After and Until

A better way of handling whether students can see the test, rather than the “Make the Link Available” option.  Also consider, they can’t start what they cannot see.  *So if you want everyone to be done by 1pm and you have a 30 minute timer with auto-submit enabled, consider Display Until to end around 12:30. 

Due Date

Due dates (and times) do not affect the test availability (unless you choose the Do not allow students to start the Test if the due date has passed option), but rather provide a flag on the test if it was started or ended after the due date/time.

Test Availability Exceptions

This section allows you to make test rule exceptions for people that need accommodations, or have other needs depending on language or technology situations.

If these settings exist for a test or survey, you can create these exceptions:

  • Number of attempts
  • Timer
  • Availability: Date and time the test is available to the student or group
  • Force completion
  • Restrict location

 

Have any interesting testing stories to tell?  What other testing options do you have questions about?  Please comment below!

This blog is a cross post from https://you.stonybrook.edu/academictechnologyservices

How echo360’s role structure when linked to blackboard cripples its functionality

SBCapture, tests, Uncategorized, , , ,

Say you are an instructor.  You want to use Blackboard and echo360 active learning or capture platform.  You have TA’s or Course Builders in Blackboard.

So, you set up a schedule of captures through your support people for your course.  You do want to publish these captures to Blackboard, so you also create this link (or maybe the support people do it for you.)  Now you and your students can click on the link in Blackboard ( for us it is a video link in the Content Area of Blackboard course…) and see all the captures. The instructor also sees a dashboard of interesting analytics and has increased possible functionality.

But here is the crappy part: TA’s and Course Builders get Instructor roles in echo360.org.

So – that neat feature where Instructors would actually have a button in their account that allows them to add an ad hoc capture on their own?  That has to be turned off.  When you use this feature one can book a recording in any room that has an echo appliance… not just the one that you class actually occurs in. Can’t have students just recording content from any place they want.  Sometimes grand rounds even happen in these rooms.. whoops HIPAA violation!

I like to allow Instructors to delete their own content.  Nope.  Turn that off.

Let instructors make copies of their content?  Nope.

Well… maybe the primary instructor for a course could just go in a demote students that have instructor roles in echo360 back to students?  Nope, instructors can only add more instructors. (I actually tried this as an admin… and yes, I can demote an instructor – theoretically to student.  Only when you actually do this, it doesn’t make them a student at all… it removes them entirely.  Don’t worry though, as soon as that TA goes back into Blackboard again and clicks through to echo360, they will be back in the course again — AS AN INSTRUCTOR.)

 

Right now – SBU is using Turning Point Cloud for clickers in our classrooms.  As of tomorrow (May 31st), Turning Technologies will be releasing a new version of the software called Turning Point 8.  It will show up as a download from your instructor user account through Turning Technologies:

 

 

Turning Point 8 is NOT backwards compatible.  Any assessment and quizzes made with Turning Point 8 will NOT work in our classrooms and lecture halls.  (See above in the screen shot where it says “Before you download, please check with your institution…”)

The new version also will not be compatible with loading grades into blackboard until we decide to switch to the new version… so even if you only teach with your own laptop, you will not want to use anything but Turning Point Cloud at this time.

 

Google Forms as a virtual clicker

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Students could use laptops, ipod touches, or smart phones in class to respond to questions from the instructor. If you keep the “poll” or quiz open, you can also collect answers asynchronously for online/flipped learning. The answers are dumped to a spreadsheet, so you have all the data for assessment, attendance and participation.

poll seen from iphone
poll seen from iphone