As you move your exams online, you may wonder how best to use Canvas’ Quiz tool to facilitate assessments. The following are some tips for high-stakes testing:
- Emphasize academic integrity: Letting students know academic integrity is an important value, for you and for Cornell, can help deter unethical behavior. One way to do this would be to set up a quiz as a kind of contract in which the students agree to abide by specific standards. You can even include a video in the instructions of the quiz that reminds students of the academic integrity policy of the university and the repercussions of breaking that policy. Consider some strategies for addressing AI use with Canvas Quizzes.
- Test the quiz tool before the exam: You want to be sure students can access Canvas quizzes and know how to properly complete and submit them. Set up a practice test perhaps using your academic integrity contract as the subject. You also want to test the assessment for yourself by adding a temporary access code and testing it in Student View.
- Design the exam to be “open book”: Professional life is usually “open book,” so consider whether your exams can be as well. Design your exam to be taken with full access to resources. Open book exams allow instructors to design exams requiring more higher-order thinking. (Check out The University of Newcastle, Australia’s guide to open book exams.)
- Randomize question and answer order: Randomizing question and answer order helps to limit students’ ability to coordinate with other students. Questions can be put into question groups in a quiz, randomizing the order of the questions within each group. If the question groups have more questions than the groups are set to pick, this will also randomize which questions each student gets (creating a question pool).
- Limit the exam availability window: The longer a quiz is available, the more opportunity for students to share information with their peers. When creating your shortened availability window, be sensitive to how it will affect students in international locations. You can also include a timer to limit the amount of time the student can spend on the assessment during that window of time.
- Show one question at a time and limit backtracking: Limiting the student to seeing one question at a time makes it more difficult for a student to do a screen capture and share it amongst their peers. Limiting backtracking may be useful, as it is a practice used in exams like the GMAT.
- Don’t release results until everyone has taken the exam: The default for automatically graded question types (all types other than Essay and File Upload) is for students to be able to see their correct and incorrect answers, as well as the correct answer for each question. Disabling this option until after everyone has taken the exam will reduce the information students can share.
- Lower Grade Anxiety: In lieu of a long, dense, cumulative final assessment, offer shorter, module-specific summative opportunities for students to demonstrate what they have learned.
