Giving Exams Online: Strategies and Tools
As you think about giving exams online, it is very important that you communicate with your students about behavior that is acceptable during the exam. Are they allowed to collaborate? To use their notes or text? To use other websites? Some of the tools described below help make these expectations clear and help prevent cheating, but the key first step your communication with students. The Binghamton Academic Integrity Code relies heavily on what instructors communicate to students about what is allowed.
Binghamton has one main tool that allows instructors to create exams online: MyCourses. Information on how to create and deploy exams in myCourses can be found on the Blackboard Help site.
Feel free to reach out to the ITS Help Desk for any myCourses questions.
Good advice:
Jim Hewlett from Finger Lakes Community College recommends that instructors set up a low stakes practice opportunity for students before having them take a high stakes exam online for the first time. Erika Offerdahl from Washington State University also suggests giving students multiple opportunities to take the exam. She says that this helps mitigate problems with unreliable internet access; if a student gets kicked out of the exam, they can log back in and just start taking it again. Because she uses question pools and question randomization, students aren’t taking the exact exam again and so are unlikely to misuse the opportunity.
Testing Options
Option 1: Change your exam to allow collaboration and use of notes or other resources.
Your best option may be to rethink your exam such that you explicitly allow students to collaborate and to use resources such as notes or texts. Complex questions that allow students to apply their knowledge can be appropriately challenging even when students can collaborate.
Option 2: Instead of an exam, use a different assessment strategy.
Exams are only one method of assessing student learning. There are many other summative assessment strategies that may align with your course learning objectives, such as essays, projects, eportfolios, or presentations. See Assessment strategies for more information.
Option 3: Use isomorphic questions and randomization to give each student a different (but equivalent) exam.
If you give an exam in a crowded lecture hall, you may use several versions of the exam. You may change the order of the questions, the order of the answers to multiple-choice items, or the precise content of the items themselves (such as changing numerical values). These options are available for exams given through myCourses, and result in each student having a slightly different but equivalent exam, reducing the probability of unwanted student-student collaboration.
Creating isomorphic questions: Isomorphic questions are those that are identical except for a small change. The idea is that you create a question pool that consists of 2-4 isomorphic questions and then the exam pulls one question from each question pool for each student exam it generates.
Instructions for creating question pools in Blackboard can be found on the Blackboard Help site.
Using randomization: Randomizing the order in which students see questions and randomizing the order of the alternatives for multiple-choice questions further reduces the probability that students will work together when you don’t want them to.
To randomize the questions for the entire exam, choose the “Randomize Questions” when editing the test options as shown in the image below.
To randomize the answer choice on a multiple-choice question, choose "Show Answers in Random Order" when creating the question as shown in the image below.
