Do Not Use "Force Completion" and Stranger Things

You are putting together a test for your online course in Blackboard.  As you scroll down to look at the different options after the timing options, you see “Force Completion”.  If a student navigates away from a Test, and the Force Completion option is turned on, the Test is automatically submitted for them by the system.

This test you are creating is online, and we cannot be too careful.  This tool will ensure that students cannot cheat, like a proctor, right?

No.

While this feature is often wrongly attributed to making online examinations more effective by dissuading academic dishonesty, Forced Completion creates more harm than whatever good it is intended to do.  Problems with Internet providers or browsers are more often the culprit than students attempting to abuse the testing time. On countless occasions help desks get calls from distraught students because their system lost the connection and their test was submitted – incomplete. Worse still, there is nothing they can do to help. This has motivated multiple universities to recommend not using, ”Force Completion”

If your goal is to punish students who have unreliable internet, browser, then "Force Completion" is a great tool.  However there is no pedagogical value in this and it creates serious issues of equity in your course.  The unreliability of Force Completion and the technical issues it creates makes it ineffective at what it was designed for at best, and discriminatory at worst.

If an assessment requires forced completion to be effective, it wasn’t much of an assessment to begin with.  Forced Completion offers arbitrary criteria in evaluating students and burdens support services. Effective online assessments allow students to demonstrate their mastery of the subject.

This can be done without forcing student to recite answers in a short period of time with arbitrary punishments divvied out.  The key to online learning is to focus on constructivist techniques for learning, and not passive learning activities.  This is not to say that online tests are not effective, but to suggest how they are used, such as a tool to help students self-assess their understanding, is key to using test successfully.  While this can be difficult to navigate, minimally it means that you should not use Force Completion.

Extending Time for Tests

You are finally getting around to implementing a test in Blackboard for your course.  You discovered great options, such as:

• Randomizing the questions and the ordering of their answers,
• Pools of questions that allow each student to get a random set of questions, ensuring each test is unique
• Feedback for each question, to re-enforce learning and to guide the student to assess where they need to spend more time improving.
• Students can take the tests multiple times, to work to improve their knowledge
• Adaptive Release and automated announcements about the test
• Tests can be timed.

Everything is going great and then you get a call from the Office of ADA Transition Services. You have a student that requires 90 minutes of time to take your 60 minute test.

At first, this seems scary.  Is there an easy way to do this without having to make another test or having to learn how to develop Groups and merge their grades in the Grade Center.  You already developed a Baroque grading schematic that requires calculus to understand, and you have no idea how this new development will play out in the Grade Center?

Yes there is!  You can take a deep breath and rest assured.  Blackboard made it easy and can solve all these problems.

You simply select Edit Test Options.
Scroll down to section titled “Test Availability Exceptions” and select the “Add User or Group” button.
This will open a window where you can select the student who needs more time.
You will notice you can:

• allow more attempts,
• change the time, and even
• change the availability of the test for the student.

Now hit “submit” and you are done

Blackboard will take care of the rest and the testing will take place seamlessly.

One advantage over regular face-to-face instruction, is that using this medium allows those with ADA requirements to not even notice their exam is any different or feel singled out from the class.
Coincidentally, this is one of the reason a large number of people with disabilities prefer the anonymity of online environments.

So, when you need to extend the time, or add special exceptions to a test, know that you can easily do with the tools we have in Blackboard.  In fact, once you use them, you may wonder why you would ever go back to tradition pen and paper.

Blackboard Test Option Crib Notes

Do you want to investigate the slides from the above video for a tutorial on how to make the most from your online quizzes?  The slide show below will offer you tips on how to take advantage of these features in Blackboard.

Downloading Survey or Test Results

Blackboard allows you to easily create surveys and test, but sometime you may want to access the results in a spreadsheet to better analyze the data. You can do this easily by:

1. Go the “Full Grade Center”
2. Click on the chevron next to the column heading for the test or survey you want to download.
3. Select “Download Results”

You will be brought to a special page with several selection options.

• We recommend that you select ‘Comma’ to create a .CSV file.  This will work with most spreadsheet programs (such as Google Sheets or Excel).
• Then select what format and attempts you want included.  It is often useful select “By Question and User” and “All Attempts”

When you are done, select “Click to Download Results”.

The file will go to your download folder.  Please note that with some computer systems the file extension, that is the .CSV, is not included in the downloaded file’s name.  You can fix this by simply renaming the file, preferably something more useful than “Download” and include the “.CSV” in the name.

Now the new file can be opened in most spreadsheet programs.

You are done!

Creating Tests

When employing a test in Blackboard you will have three basic tasks:

1. You will create the test
2. You will need to create the questions (if you do not have a question set)
3. You will need to set up or deploy the test

Tests are assessments, so selecting the assessment tab will give the option to create a test of a survey.  In Blackboard, surveys are anonymous tests.  For this reason, we will focus here on tests as assessments and not on surveys.

When you select 'Test' you will asked name the test. Once you do this and select submit, you have accomplished task #1.

Moving to task #2, you will need to fill the test with questions either by selecting existing questions or creating new questions.

• You can search for existing questions from other tests or from test pools.
• You can select from many different styles of questions to create.

When you select or create a question, it is displayed on a question canvas that shows all the questions in a test. You can assign points to each questions, as well as edit their placement, edit their content or delete the question. You should also offer comments for correct and incorrect answers to the questions to assist the student's learning.

Once you complete task #2, you now can move on to the task #3 where you will deploy the test.

You will have to make the test link visible to students. NOTE: Blackboard's default is to hide test from students.  You will need to select the feature to make the test visible.

We recommend making the test visible to students as well as having the instructions visible as well.

You can now choose several options about the test.

• Please do not select Forced Completion. This tends to end test because of internet interference and IT cannot help the students.  A timed test that marks and submits the test when it is over works fine.
• You can choose the timed feature and accommodate ADA needs with the Exemptions options.
• You can encourage students to assess their own knowledge by offering multiple attempts with a timed test.

Once you select "submit" the test is deployed and it is added to the Grade Center.

Now that you can create a test, you may want to take advantage of several powerful features of Blackboard.

Question Pools

Question Pools allow the instructors to use questions in multiple assessments. They group questions so that they can be both imported and exported.
To build a pool, you will need to:

1. Go to the Control Panel and select the "Test, Surveys and Pools" option. 
2. Select "Pools"
3. Select "Build Pool" and complete the needed information page. Then hit “select”. 
4. You now have the option to create, find (from within the course) or upload questions to the pool.
5. Either create the questions or find the questions you want, and then submit.

Random Blocks

A random block is a number of questions selected from one or more question pools to be included in a test.

To create a Random Block you will need to select the element desired, such as an existing test.  You will then select "edit" to edit the test.

From the edit section, go to the Reuse Tab and select "Create Random Block":

1. Select questions - these must be from Pools (and not other tests) 
2. Search by criterion and select the questions desired. Then hit submit.
3. Then assign the number of questions to be displayed to students. (This should be less than the total number of questions)
4. Select OK

Final Note

Remember, best practices in test taking is to:

• Treat an online exam as an 'open book' exam and offer students a more authentic learning experience.  By being challenged even when they have the resources at hand, the test is more similar to real world challenges.
• Have multiple attempts and include error replies that identify student weaknesses and offer advice to how they can improve takes the exam past a measure of learning to becoming a vehicle that serves as part of the learning process.  This will allow students to reflect and improve
• Ask questions that require application of the knowledge the assessment is measuring. Design assessments to demonstrate the ability to apply knowledge the ranks higher on Blooms Taxonomy of Learning.  An added bonus of these assessment types is that they are great at reducing cheating (academic dishonesty). 

 Keep these in mind and your assessments can be an effective pedagogical tool.

Traditional Courses and Online Tests

There are several reasons for adopting online tests for a traditional (face-to-face) course.  The technology employs randomization to ensure each student receives a unique test and that the answer selections vary to prevent cheating.  The online nature also allows computers to increase accessibility for students, and accommodating ADA concerns is easier as well as more discrete.  Further, offering the test outside of class both can remove environmental factors that could impede student performance while freeing up more time for student-teacher interaction.  Finally, in developing successful online exams, we need to rethink exams to promote self-assessment which can be accomplished by treating the exam as an open-book exam.    Over all, this re-evaluation of evaluations assists us in developing a more pedagogically sound course.

 It is important to rethink the actual purpose of an assessment.  Are we trying to get a grade for the student or is the goal to teach the student?  If our goal is the latter you should definitely design the exam with feedback.  Having feedback to correct errors is critical in early stages.  Traditionally students have to wait days, if not weeks, to get feedback on their mistakes. This feedback is sometime not informative as well.  The benefit of online exams is that they can be created such that errors can been identified and students can be supplied with why they are incorrect and where they can go to discover the correct answers.  By empowering students with this knowledge, the test can motivate the student to review material that they have the weakest understanding. Consequently, the students will be working on learning the material better.

By developing tests that afford multiple attempts, students have an incentive to reflect on areas they need improvement and the opportunity to improve.  Swift feedback can encourage students to review areas that they have not yet mastered.  The exam becomes more of an active skill building tool, instead of a quick means to assign a grade.  Coincidentally, since an online environment may have several pitfalls, such as spotty WiFi, having multiple attempts to master the material also become best practices for both practical and pedagogical reasons.

If you haven’t considered adopting online exams instead of having an exam within your class, you should consider trying it once.  There is more work up-front in developing the question sets and the feedback. However, you will find that the adoption is very rewarding.  Besides not having to spend much energy on grading after the exams are taken, your students will better understand the material and succeed.