Assessment settings

Note: To complete these procedures, you must be assigned a role having the necessary permissions. To determine your role, follow the directions in Participant roles. For a basic understanding of roles and permissions, see Permissions and roles: Overview.

To reach the Settings page for an assessment, from the menubar of the appropriate site, click Tests & Quizzes. On the Assessments page, click Settings beneath the title of the assessment. Click the black arrow for a type of setting to see the options.

Note: Altering the settings for one assessment does not impact the settings of other assessments you created. Altering the options in the settings for an assessment does not impact any other options.

The settings available depend on whether or not your assessment is published; see Settings for published assessments below. They may also depend on what assessment type you are using. The default assessment type does not include all possible settings.

If you wish to include more settings than you see available for an unpublished assessment, you will need to create and edit a new assessment type; see Adding, editing, or deleting an Assessment Type.

Assessment settings

Following is a list of all possible settings:

• Assessment Type Information: If you chose to base your assessment on an existing custom template, its title, author(s), and a brief description will automatically display here.
  
  
• Assessment Introduction: Specify the title and author(s) of an assessment, add an attachment to the assessment, and add a description of, or introduction to, the assessment. The assessment's creator (i.e., the user who was logged in when the assessment was created) is also listed, but you cannot modify this information.
  
  
• Delivery Dates: Specify when (date and time) an assessment will be made available, when it will be due, and when it will be retracted. To set the dates and times, click the calendar icon next to each field.
  
  
• Assessment Released To: Choose to release the assessment to anonymous users, restrict its availability to only site members, or restrict its availability to only selected groups.

  Note: If you release an assessment to anonymous users, you must distribute its URL to participants; it will not be accessible from within your site's Tests & Quizzes tool. Note the URL while publishing the assessment (see Publishing an assessment), or if the assessment is already published, go to the settings page of the version located under "Published Assessments" (not the copy under "Pending Assessments"), click to expand the Assessment Released To section, and copy the URL shown there.

• High Security: You can do either or both of the following:
  
  
  • Create a unique username and password combination (both fields are required) that all students use to access each test
  • Specify that only certain IP addresses can access your assessment. An asterisk ( * ) can stand for any single subnet to represent a range of IP addresses, e.g., 171.64.139.* or 171.64.*.* .
  
  
• Timed Assessment: You can specify the amount of time allowed. This option will cause the assessment to submit automatically when the time is up.
  
  
• Assessment Organization: Govern the appearance and behavior of your assessment. The following options are available:
  
  
  • Navigation: Choose from the following:
    
    
    • Linear access: Limits users to progressing forward through an assessment without access to the table of contents.
    • Random access: Allows users to move from question to question throughout the assessment using either the Previous and Next buttons, or the table of contents.
    
    
  • Question Layout: Choose to display each question on a separate web page, each part on a separate web page, or the complete assessment on one web page.
  • Numbering: Choose continuous numbering throughout all parts of the assessment, or choose to restart numbering with each part.
  
  
• Mark for Review: Enabling the Mark for Review option adds a checkbox labeled Mark for Review under every question in an assessment. Students can check the boxes to mark questions they would like to return to before submitting the assessment. This feature is not available when the assessment is configured for linear access. In the settings for your Assessment Type, use the first checkbox to determine whether or not you can change this setting; use the second checkbox to select the default value for this setting.
  
  
• Submissions: Specify how many submissions you'll allow, and use the "Late Handling" option to indicate whether or not you'll accept submissions after the due date (see Delivery Dates above for information on the Due Date option). If you choose to accept late submissions, such submissions will be flagged during grading.
  
  
• Submission Message: Type a message or specify a URL to be delivered to the user upon submission.
  
  
• Feedback:
  
  
  • Feedback Authoring: Choose from the following:
    
    
    • Question-Level Feedback: Allows feedback based on question regardless of the answer
    • Selection-Level Feedback: Allows feedback based on the answer given (i.e., different answers depending on which selection the student chose)
    • Both: This allows you to use both types of feedback.
    
    
  • Feedback Delivery: Choose from the following:
    
    
    • Immediate Feedback (i.e., while taking the assessment)
    • Feedback on submission (Best used with the "Record the last score" grading option)
    • No Feedback will be displayed to the student (Overrides other options, and suppresses all feedback and scores)
    • Feedback will be displayed to the student at a specific date (Click the calendar icon to specify the date)

    Note: You should not use the Immediate Feedback setting in Tests & Quizzes when assessing learning, as it may provide information students can use to correct their answers before submitting a test.

  Also, you can choose any combination of the following options to include in the feedback:

  • Student response
  • Correct response
  • Student's assessment score
  • Student's question scores
  • Question-level feedback
  • Selection-level feedback
  • Grader's comments
  • Statistics and histogram

  If you choose to release any of the items listed above, the tool will also release questions to students. To prevent students from seeing the questions but allow them to see their scores, choose Only Release Student's Assessment Scores (questions not shown). You cannot release other feedback if you select this option.

• Grading: Specify whether grading is to be anonymous, if grades should be sent to the Gradebook or not, and how to process the scores if multiple submissions are allowed. If you select anonymous grading, graders won't be able to see usernames associated with assessment submissions.
  
  
• Graphics: Change the appearance of your assessment:
  
  
  • Click the palette icon next to the "Background Color" field to open the color picker. From the drop-down list, select the palette you'd like to use (Web Safe Palette, Windows System Palette, or Grey Scale Palette), and then click the color you want to use for your assessment's background color. The hexadecimal value representing your color will automatically populate the "Background Color" field.
  • In the "Background Image" field, you can type the URL of an image file to be used as the background image.
  
  
• Metadata: Specify keywords, objectives, and rubrics to facilitate searches for and categorization of your assessment. Additionally, you have the option to collect metadata for questions.

To save the settings for an assessment, click Save Settings at the bottom of the page. Click Cancel to cancel any unsaved changes.

Note: An assessment must contain at least one question in order to be published.

Settings for published assessments

You can modify the settings, parts, and questions of any assessment listed under "Pending Assessments". When you publish an assessment, a copy is created and listed under "Published Assessments". For the published copy, you can make changes to all the settings except "Assessment Released To".

Note: After you've published an assessment, if you modify its "Pending Assessments" copy, you'll have to alter the assessment's name before publishing it. When you publish it, you'll be creating another copy under "Published Assessments", not replacing the existing published copy.