Tests & Quizzes allows you to create online assessments. You will use it mainly to adminster tests and quizzes, but it can also be used to gather survey information and informal course feedback.
Multiple question types can be included in an assessment, including ones that require students to upload files. You can choose how to organize, deliver and collect the assessment. You can choose to scramble questions so that they appear in a different order for each student, and you can scramble multiple choice answers so that the answers appear in a different order for each student. You can create a question pools with more questions than necessary so that each student receives a random choice of questions.
Grading is done automatically for objective questions (true/false, multiple choice, matching), and grades can be posted automatically to the gradebook tool.
By configuring an assessment's settings, you can determine when an assessment will become available, set time limits, determine how many times a student can take an assessment, and indicate whether or not late submissions will be accepted.
Creating a Test: When you click Create on the Tests & Quizzes page, you are naming and setting up the test, and entering the assessment editor. From here, you can go on to create test content, including questions and the parts (sections) that will contain them.
Parts: Within the question editor, you not only create the question and its possible answers, but you can assign the question to a part or a question pool, add feedback and metadata, and choose whether or not to require students to add rationale for their answer.
Settings: From the Assessments page, you can view and modify the settings for all your assessments. Within the settings, you can create an introduction for your assessment, determine its deliver dates and to whom it will be released, set security levels, specify time limits and the number of submissions allowed, add graphics, feedback, and metadata, and determine how the assessment will be graded.
Question Pools: You can organize questions into question pools so that you can reuse and share them with other instructors. You can subdivide quesiton pools into subpools to organize questions by subject matter, section number, question type, or any other criteria. For example, an instructor can create a question pool called "Biology 105", and then create subpools called "Basic Concepts", "Cell Biology", and "Genetics".
3/8/06