3 Assessment Strategies
There are two main assessment tools available on Brightspace to assess student learning online: Quizzes and Assignments.
Online Exams using Quizzes
You can create online exams using quizzes on Brightspace to evaluate student learning frequently (e.g. using short quizzes), or for MidTerm and Final exams. A variety of question types exist, Multiple Choice, Multi-Select, True or False, Written Response, Short Answer, Fill in the Blanks, Arithmetic, etc.
Designing quiz questions
Spend time designing your quiz questions carefully, by making sure that the questions are aligned with the learning objectives, and achievable in a timely manner.
You can use different types of questions, the most commonly used are Multiple-Choice, Multiple-Select and Short Answer, as they are automatically graded. These questions can be referred as “well-structured problems” (Cormier, 2021); they come with a clearly defined question, clear inputs and well-defined answers (e.g. Multiple-Choice, Multi-Select), and are automatically graded or come with a clear rubric. Other types of questions such as Written response could be considered, they require more time to answer, and the student answers will defer from one student to another. They are referred as “ill-structured problems”; they are questions that may be difficult to formulate, or that have different answers possible, and answers deferring from one student to another. They will need to be manually graded, but they can help deal with exam cheating. They can be associated to ‘real-life problems’.
The following quiz features can help maintain exam integrity by reducing cheating:
- Shuffle the order of questions at the quiz level. If your quiz contains sections, you can shuffle the sections, the questions within any section, or both.
- Question pool to randomly select questions from a question library.
- Section where you can shuffle the questions within a section (or group of questions).
Randomizing the quiz questions
Randomizing questions in a quiz ensures that each student will receive a unique set of questions, which is a strategy that can help reduce cheating. You can shuffle all the quiz questions, but you can also use a question pool to randomly select questions from a question library (# out of), or create a section to shuffle the questions only within that section.
How to proceed with Quizzes?
There are three main steps to follow when creating a quiz on Brightspace.
In the quiz Properties, you need to:
- Enter the quiz name
- Add/Edit questions (where you can create questions one by one of from a question pool)
- Define the number of questions per page (with the option of preventing students from moving backwards through pages). Leave empty if you want to display all the questions on the same page, or if questions are linked to one another.
- Shuffle the questions at the quiz level (or within sections or using question pools)
- Add a description (shown before quiz availability) and/or an introduction (shown at quiz commencement).
- Add a page header and/or footer.
In the Restrictions, you can:
- set a start and end date (to make the quiz link available to students during a defined time period).
- a due date (it can be before or at the same time as the end date).
- Indicate the timing with Recommended time limit or Enforced Time Limit (you can add a grace period in case of technical issues, and prevent students from making further changes).
- Add Special Access Students (students who need an extra attempt or more time to complete an online exam). Special Access can also be used for students taking an online exam through Zoom, when the rest of the class is taking the exam through Respondus Monitor. Make sure to uncheck both Required to take this quiz and Required to view quiz feedback and results.
In the Assessment tab, you will need to:
- Add grade item to create a column in the Grades tool, and allow quiz results to be automatically linked to the Grades tool.
- You can also decide to allow attempt to be set as graded immediately upon completion so that students can see their score as soon as their submit their quiz), or export grades automatically upon completion (to send auto-graded attempt scores directly to the grade book). If your quiz is entirely composed of automatically graded questions such as multiple-choice, multiple-answer questions, True-False, Fill-in-the-blank).
