Please, let ME help YOU: Answering Your Assessment Questions

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ Announcements
With many schools quickly approaching exams, finals, mid-terms and other test style activities, we've put together a list of our most frequently asked Assessment questions and answered them. Enjoy!With semester finals and mid-terms looming in the not too distant future, we want to call attention to our Assessments feature. Assessments have become an integral part of a lot of online classrooms and we know teachers can run into a few issues with them. We thought we would address some frequently asked assessment questions:

Should I publish an Assessment I haven’t finished building?
Please do not publish your Assessment until you have finished building it! As soon as an Assessment is published, students can access it even if you haven’t finished adding questions to it. We are aware that the publish option defaults to Now and we are looking to update this default to No in the future but for right now, you must select No for Publish or make sure to set an assigned date in the future when creating your Assessment.


Otherwise, students can access the assessment as you are building it. For example, if you have only created three of your ten questions when a student accesses the Assessment, they will only see those three questions even if you continue to build out the Assessment after they have accessed it.

Can I give a student extra time on a timed assessment?
If you have a student with a 504 or IEP plan that requires extra time on tests and quizzes, you can provide additional time for them on timed assessments. Once you have set a Time to complete for an Assessment, you will see an Adjust individual student times link. You can use this link to provide students with additional time. Once you have added these individual student times, students will appear with their times under the Time to complete field for an easy way to double check your changes.

Why does it say Allow Continue for a student?
Allow Continue will be available if the Student lost access to their assessment due to their internet connection, from the system crashing or timing out, or if they navigate away from the assessment after they start it. Allow Continue will allow the student to pick back up where they left off and any answers that have been saved will still be completed.


If multiple students have lost connection to an assessment, use Allow incomplete students to continue at the top of the Assessment details page to allow all students with an Incomplete status to continue their assessment.  If teachers are using Allow continue a lot, they can also setup their Assessment with Allow save for later which will let the student continue their assessment without teacher intervention.

What is the difference between Allow Retake and Allow Save for later?
Allow save for later allows a student to close out of the Assessment and then reopen it at a later time with all of their previously supplied answers still captured in the Assessment. Allow Retake allows a student to take the assessment again after they have already submitted an attempt.

We also see a lot of issues where teachers confuse Allow Save for later with multiple attempts. If a teacher has enabled multiple attempts on an Assessment, each time the student selects Take Again, they will be given a new instance of the Assessment. This means if a student accidentally submits an Assessment without completing all their questions, if they select Take Again, they will not return to the previously submitted Assessment, they will be taken to a completely new instance of the Assessment and their previously supplied answers will be overwritten by the new Assessment. You should always remind your students that Submit means the Assessment is being submitted for grading and Save/Resume means they are still working on their Assessment.

Where can I view assessment results? Are questions automatically graded?
From your Assignment center or Assignments tab in your class, you can select the Assignment title to view a list of student submissions. Select Results for a student to see an individual student’s answers. Multiple choice, True/False, and Fill in the blank question types will be automatically scored, but the scores can be overwritten if needed. One thing to keep in mind with Fill in the blank questions is to not use commas when providing multiple answers. The system does not know to parse the commas out of the answer. Any essay questions will be listed as Awaiting and you will need to provide a score for these questions.

Can I copy an existing assessment?
Teachers cannot copy existing assessments. However, teachers can import their assessments from one course to another using the Import option from the Assignments tab and using the available filters to find the Assessment they would like to import.

We hope that we have been able to answer some of your questions about Assessments. We also recommend taking a peek at our updated Assessments guide which also will walk you through creating your Assessment.


Have a question that we didn't answer above? Drop your question in the comments section below if you have more questions about how to make Assessments work for your classroom!

 

Comments

  • Steven Bailey
    Steven Bailey
    Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
    I noticed in "Allow Continue" you indicate Allow Continue will allow the student to pick back up where they left off and any answers that have been saved will still be completed.  However what happens when a student it taking a timed assessment and he does 10 of 15 problems and then loses the internet (for several hours perhaps).  He comes back 3 hours later (long after the timer has expired) ... what happens?  Are his questions and answers saved EVEN THOUGH he has not hit the save button?  If they are not then what is being done to save them?  How should the test be completed?  Can't he start from where he left off?   

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