Online Final Exams

1. Review technology requirements with your students and provide alternatives to any students who may need them.  Specific suggestions related to considering low-tech and low bandwidth alternatives can be found here.

2. Consider creating an “Open-Book” Exam: Open-book final exams are much better suited for online delivery where students have full access to the Web.  Students should be advised to study for an open book exam the same way they would for a closed book exam.  

3. Request referencing notes: When students can use their resources, they are encouraged to review their notes, and other course material and will try to prepare the material in a way that they can access it during the short amount of time that they have to answer the question. 

4. Question Construction: Try to construct one or two higher-order thinking questions with example answers to assess their suitability for your own course content. Consider using the short answer format in BB which only requires text entry.  Try to avoid multiple choice and basic identification questions that are easy to search on the Internet. Create more application type questions that ask students to analyze, explain and interpret.

5. Do a Test Run: Try to answer one or two of these questions to get a sense of how much time it takes for students to complete each question. For some of your students, this will be their first online final exam. Considering doubling the resulting times to get a more realistic estimate in terms of time required for students.  

The Blackboard Quiz Feature can deliver an online final exam. You can you create a series of questions and choose to schedule the final exam at the specific date/time that the original face-to-face final exam was already scheduled.  An open-book final exam is also a prime candidate for a “take-home” style exam, which eliminates the stress that can come with possible technical issues during to online exams. 

Resources and How-To’s:

1. The BlackBoard Quiz Feature

2. Tip Sheet on creating a quiz in Blackboard

3. Overview video: How to create a quiz in your original course view

4. BlackBoard Adaptive Release: Can be an option for open-ended questions

5. For help: Please email ctl@humber.ca and a member of our BlackBoard Support Team will reach out to you!

1. Randomize Questions: Randomize exam questions and answer choices in the exam. The effect of randomized questions is that two students who may be sitting side by side or on the phone together will receive different sets of questions and won’t be able to share their answers in ‘real’ time.  

2. Create a Question Bank: Create and use a bank of questions; you can have over twice the number of questions in the bank.   If you wanted, you could have three versions of the exact same question.  Questions can be deployed in randomized blocks, thereby creating a different exam for each student. 

3. Present one question per page:  If you present one question per page then students who are in a group chat with other students will all have different questions to work on at different times.  Additionally, if students have a limited amount of time to answer each question, it will be challenging for them to copy one another’s answer and respond to their own question.   

1. Instructions: Provide clear instructions for students on how they should proceed with the online final exam, including start and stop times. 

2. Contact Information:  Clearly share a phone number and email where you can be immediately reached if a student is accidentally locked out or experiences a technical issue during the exam.  

3. Fielding Questions: Consider running a Blackboard Discussion Forum where students can ask questions and all students can see the questions and your responses during the test. 

4. Caution: As a safety measure against potential technical issues, you could suggest that students create a local word document to store all their answers and then copy/paste their answers onto the Blackboard quiz itself.  If their Wi-fi connection is lost mid-way through the exam, they will be able to continue working on the exam and then email you the Word document as an attachment.   

5. Back-Up Plan:  Just in case of a major technical glitch or issue, what will you do instead?  Notify students of what your back-up plan is and reassure them that you are all in this together! 

It is always a good idea to remind students of any college and course expectations related to academic integrity. Now more than ever students are facing significant stress that can affect both personal and academic well-being.  At all times, but especially during times of disruption, faculty can consider best ways to build respect, trust and flexibility into every interaction with students.   

Online exams and assessments pose unique challenges related to ensuring academic integrity is maintained.  Here are some steps to try and ensure that students fulfill requirements around academic integrity in the online and remote learning environment: 

1. Maintain communication: Check in with your students as they are working on their assignments. Ask if they have any questions and remind them of expectations. 

2. Talk to your students directly about academic integrity: Discuss what academic integrity means in this new online environment. Share tips on what to do and what not to do when working online.  

3. Review Standardized Assignment Requirements: As students are now working without the support of classmates and under increased stress, please take the time to review your expectations. For instance, if students are writing research papers, please take the time to review APA or MLA formatting guidelines, so that they remember how to properly cite sources in written text.  

4. Encourage the Citing of Sources:  Even in informal writing such as journal or blog entries, ask students to include a list of all Internet sources that they viewed, in order to remind them to include proper quotations around others’ material.   

5. Consider individualized assessments:  To encourage students to develop their own thinking, consider building in self-reflection, personal examples or narration into assignments, or assigning students to different topics. 

6. Group submissions:  Consider permitting students to opt to work with a friend or to submit an assignment independently.  This is another element of authentic assessment, as students will also build skills of teamwork and collaboration during this exercise.  

7. Use randomized question generation, as discussed in Blackboard quizzes and exams above, to enable students who do work in the same room to be able to focus on their own work. 

8. For more detailed guidelines and resources on “Encouraging Academic Integrity Online”, please see here.