Best Practices: Develop and Grade Low-Stakes Quizzes and High-Stakes Exams

Have students practice taking an ungraded quiz in bCourses before having them complete one for a grade

Before having students take a quiz for a grade, you can create an ungraded quiz with the settings you intend to use for students to practice what the experience is like. This will help reduce their anxiety about the process if they've never taken an online quiz before and will reveal any issues that could occur or adjustments needed in the quiz settings to have the quizzes function the way you intend.

You could make the questions on this ungraded practice content related or use it as an opportunity to learn more about your students by asking questions such as what are their goals for the course, what do they want to do after graduating, or what other courses are they taking in the semester. 

Edit instructions and quiz questions directly in bCourses

When making edits, it's better to do it directly in bCourses, rather than copying and pasting from a word processing document. That is because in the word processing documents, when you copy over the text, you will also copy over the formatting from the document. In some cases, this will be evident because you will see the formatting within the text editor, but in other cases, you may copy over formatting that is not evident. Even if the formatting is not obvious, it will be noticed by a screen reader and potentially make the content inaccessible for students who are using such a tool.

Add self-check quizzes to highlight important concepts from the instructional materials

Self-check quizzes give students a way to review the lecture material and confirm they have correctly understood the material before moving onto the next item. A common pattern is to have a lecture or series of lecture segments followed by a self-check quiz. In this context, the quiz isn't an assessment of the student, but rather another instructional component intended for the students' own use. The quiz then provides you another opportunity to highlight the most important points from the lecture. 

In light of that, you can set self-check quizzes to be "practice quizzes" in bCourses, which means that students will be able to review their responses but you will not see them in the Gradebook. You might opt to use the practice quiz feature as a way to reduce the amount of content you need to review and keep in the mindset that these quizzes are really part of instruction and not for assessment.

Review quizzes from student view before they are available to students

It's good practice to review the quizzes from Student View Links to an external site. before they become available to students. This will allow you to catch any potential errors in the questions or answer choices and correct them before students begin taking the quiz. You also can take the quiz as a "student" and confirm that the correct answer choice has been set and students will see the correct answers according to your desired specifications. If you find any errors, it is much easier to make edits and change the settings before students take the quiz, and seeing it in Student View will bring to light potential issues. 

Grade and provide feedback on quizzes and exams before the next assignment is due

In many cases, your quiz or exam will automatically generate the correct answers for students if you use multiple choice or another similar question format. However, in some cases, you may have a quiz or exam that has open questions and will need to be graded by you or the GSI in order to provide a final grade. When a quiz or exam has these types of questions that need grading attention, it's important to remember to grade those questions and give feedback to students before the next assignment is due. Students rely on the feedback via their quizzes to monitor their comprehension of materials and progress and it is even more important for students who may miss several class periods due to a variety of reasons. 

Be transparent about any edits or corrections to quiz questions

If you do find any errors in a quiz after students have begun taking it, you can still edit the quiz to make those corrections. In this case, be sure to be transparent about any edits by communicating the changes to students. You can select "Notify Students of Changes" when you edit the quiz and students will receive an automatic notification that the quiz has been edited. However, you can use this as a good learning opportunity by posting an announcement explaining why the edit was made. The more you proactively communicate with students as a group about updates to the course, the more you will build a sense of community and ease any anxieties they have, especially around grades.

Related, if you do need to edit a quiz because the wrong answer was marked as correct, you may consider giving all students a point for the question, which is one of the options available when you edit a quiz students have already begun to take. For example, if it is one point in a 10-point quiz, it might be worth it in the long run to give that extra point and then draw attention to the correction as an opportunity for learning.   

Use the Moderate Quiz page to address student needs

In Module 6, we'll look at how you can use the Moderate Quiz page to address accommodations required for students with documented disabilities. However, you can also use this feature to address other student needs as you see fit. Sometimes students may have had legitimate challenges accessing or submitting a quiz, and in those cases, you may want to give them another attempt, which you can do via the Moderate Quiz page.