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Email: digitallearning@msmc.edu
Phone: 845-569-3457
Hours of Operation: Mon-Fri 8:00a – 4:30p (Closed Weekends)
eClass Quizzes and Exams
The Quiz activity in eClass is a powerful tool that can meet many teaching needs, from simple, multiple-choice knowledge tests to complex, self-assessment tasks with detailed feedback. Questions can be created and stored separately in a Question bank and can be reused in different quizzes. Using an online quiz for summative or formative assessment has many advantages. Some of them include:
- The ability to provide immediate feedback, when appropriate
- Immediate grading, which can lessen the instructor’s grading workload
- Re-useable questions, which can be randomized so that each student receives a unique exam
- More flexibility for both student and instructor in terms of time and place
- Allows instructors to use in-class time more strategically
- Additional controls to discourage and prevent academic dishonesty
Video Tutorials
Displayed below is a video tutorial playlist for eClass quizzes and exams. Click the playlist icon at the top right of the video to see related tutorials, or click here to be brought to our YouTube Channel.
Documentation
- Using Online Quizzing Better (Source: Inside Higher Ed)
- Best Practices for Offering Exams Online (Source: Kansas State University)
- Low + High-Stakes Assessment (Source: UC Santa Barbara)
- Effective Quiz Practices (Source: Moodle Docs)
- Strategies for Ensuring Academic Honesty with Quizzes (Source: Moodle Docs)
- Standard Question Types (Source: Moodle Docs)
FAQs
In brief, no. Instructors have full control over how long students will have to complete quizzes and tests. However, for low-stakes quizzes intended for formative assessment or a self-check for learners, a time limit might not be necessary.
When determining how long to make your higher-stakes exams, the Eberly Center of Testing Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University recommends that you time yourself taking your exam and then triple that time for students. If you want a fresh set of eyes to look at your exam, you can also give it to a colleague to take, and then anywhere from double to quadruple the time they take for your students depending on the subject and level.
How much time you should allot for your exam also depends on the types of questions on it. Kansas Curriculum Center’s David Clay suggests:
- 30 seconds per true-false item
- 60 seconds per multiple choice item
- 120 seconds per short answer item
- 10-15 minutes per essay question
- 5 to 10 minutes to review the work
If you create categories in your question bank, you can break up and organize your question content by topic, chapters in a textbook, the intended test, etc.
After you finalize a quiz in your course, we recommend that you use the “Preview” function to take your own test. This will help highlight any typos, formatting errors, errors in scoring, or any other issues that can be addressed ahead of time.
There are two ways to randomize the question order in your quizzes.
The first way is to enter all of your questions into the quiz activity, and then check off the “shuffle” option in the “Edit quiz” page. This would make all of the questions in the quiz appear in a random order when a student takes the quiz.
Another option would be to “Add a random question” from your question bank, which allows for the random allocation of a question from a larger repository of questions. This would create more variety in the selection of questions in the quiz, but might hinder the statistical analysis of question content.
Yes, the answer options would be shuffled by default. As long as you do not turn off the settings “Shuffle the choices” (in question settings) or “Shuffle within questions” (in quiz settings), then the answer options will be shuffled for each quiz attempt.
Please note: Given that answer options are shuffled by default, it is advised that instructors avoid using the phrase “[All/None] of the above,” as this answer option might not appear at the bottom.
In the “Edit quiz” page, you can set a point value for each question in a quiz. You can set certain questions to have a higher point value in the quiz, which would increase their contribution towards the final score. Instructors might use this to apply different weights to different question types, such as to have an essay question more heavily weighted than a multiple choice question.
No. In the “Edit quiz” page, there is a setting for the “Maximum grade.” Regardless of the total number points in the quiz, the final score will scale itself to the number of points in the “Maximum grade” field. For example, if the total points is 50 and the maximum grade is 100, a score of 48 would become a final grade of 96.
Yes, you have the ability to make corrections and adjust the student scores accordingly. Edit the questions as needed in the “Edit quiz” page (i.e. adjust the score on answer options, change the point value of questions, etc.), and then use the “Regrade” function in the grade report to regrade the student attempts.
Yes! This can be done through the overrides function in the quiz.
User overrides allow you provide an exception to the rules of a quiz for a specific student (or students). For example, if you have a student that needs additional time on an exam, a user override will allow you to add more time for that student without changing the quiz settings for everyone. It can also provide deadline extensions for an individual if they had extenuating circumstances that prevented them from taking the quiz during the allotted window of time.
Our video Testing Accommodations with Quiz Overrides provides an overview of how to set an override for an individual student in an online quiz.
We generally recommend a computer with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as a browser. However, you can also take a quiz on a mobile device in its built-in browser if necessary.