Overview

If you are running a summative test or exam in Moodle, as well as referring to the Module Assessment guidance in the Academic Manual, you also need to use this guidance and checklist to ensure you have set up the Quiz or Assignment properly and have considered what to do in case anything goes wrong with the technology.
Quiz-specific information is preceded by ( ).

Important update regarding Safe Exam Browser in cluster rooms

Staff have reported that students are prompted to download the SEB configuration file on managed PCs in cluster rooms. Once downloaded, and with the launch of the SEB quiz, students are currently prompted to complete Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

This is ordinarily not required. This is currently being investigated. Status updates shall be posted on our Moodle Known Issues page.

Key reminders

Please be reminded that Exam Guard is in effect for quizzes open for less than 5 hours, so course editing will be disabled from 10 minutes before the quiz starts until 10 minutes after it ends. To avoid any disruptions, we recommend setting the "Open the quiz" time to match the exam start time when creating the quiz, as well as leaving the quiz availability setting on "Show on course page" rather than "Hide on course page".
Exam Guard Update (May 2025)!
Course Administrators and Tutors can now see an “Extend time” button at the top right of the quiz page when the exam is in progress. Should an exceptional situation occur such as a fire alarm, they can enter the number of minutes they wish to extend the assessment by to extend the close time for students currently sitting the exam.
Please note: If some students are taking the quiz at a different time (e.g. in the case where there are different sittings or for students with SoRAs), it will not affect the close time for them, as it will only extend the time for those who are in the process of taking the assessment.

For exams over 5 hours, where Exam Guard is not available, please avoid editing the Moodle course or its activities while students are actively taking a quiz on the same Moodle course. Editing course content while a quiz is underway (specifically instances where there are a large number of participants) may impact the performance of your Moodle course and its activities.

At least four weeks before the exam is scheduled to take place, it is vital you complete the Exam Notification Form so that the Digital Education team can complete any necessary tasks, and notify ISD to perform room checks. If this is the first time you are running an online exam please state this in the Exam Notification Form in "Additional Info" and a member of Digital Education team can check your exam settings in advance.

DO NOT schedule your exam during a planned Moodle outage or maintenance window - see Maintenance updates. Currently, the window for Moodle maintenance is weekdays midnight-8am, the primary slot used is 6am-8am Thursday mornings.

AVOID scheduling your exam within the UCL transition window of 5mins to, or 5mins past the hour. Where possible, we recommend to adjust the start time of timed quizzes to 10 or 15 minutes past the hour (e.g. 11:10am, 12:15pm etc.) especially where the quiz is being taken by a large number of students.

Moodle Quiz - Activity Completion - please note if you have enabled Activity completion, the 'Require view' field MUST be unselected, otherwise, this can slow down student access during their attempt. Please refer to the Recommended Moodle Quiz Settings checklist below.

On this page:

M12a1 - Moodle Quiz Invigilator Checklist

In advance of the exam - checklist

As early as possible

Book a computer room.
- It is recommended that you book a room with 10% more computers than you need, this will ensure that there will be spare computers in the room in case of a computer failure.
- Good practice for digital examinations (British Standard 23988) states that no online exam should last more than 90 minutes without a break. If you need to run a longer exam you should split it into two parts with a break in between.
- If you use a non-centrally bookable room (e.g. Birkbeck facilities) please familiarise yourself with the login requirements/facilities in the room BEFORE the exam takes place.
Decide what you will do if there are technical issues that prevent you from running the exam on Moodle - e.g. have paper copies ready to be printed/reschedule.

6 weeks before

Students who require special arrangements must notify Student Support and Wellbeing.

4 weeks before

Set up and check your quiz settings
- Set up and check your quiz settings against the recommended Moodle Quiz settings below.
- Notify Digital Education. Please ensure you complete the Moodle Exam Notification Form with at least four weeks' notice of the exam taking place, to allow sufficient time to make necessary arrangements.
  If it is your first time running a Moodle quiz, you can also ask Digital Education to check your settings in advance.
- Identify and brief the invigilators who will attend the exam in each location. It is essential that you have enough invigilators to ensure that candidates are not cheating. Invigilators will need to be familiar with the Moodle environment and with your test.

3 weeks before

Practice material & briefing students: Familiarise your students with the Moodle assessment tools before they sit the exam, e.g. ask them to complete a trial quiz or upload a test assignment.
- Prepare a practice quiz for your students, or use Digital Education's example quiz.
- Let them know the scoring rules, number and types of questions, any navigation constraints and the time limit.
- Include an informative introduction (in the description of the quiz or assignment settings).

2 weeks before

Test your exam: Check the exam thoroughly and ask someone from your discipline to run through it and provide feedback.
Check:
- Images load and are mentioned in the question text (so if they don't load during the exam students know they are missing information).
- Text is large enough and easy to read.
- Questions and answers are clearly articulated.
- Distractors (wrong answers) are not too obvious.
- Double check the answers, if using multiple choice questions.

1 week before

Remind students to ensure they are able to log into Moodle at least 2 working days before the exam. If they are unable to log in, please ask them to contact One Desk IT. If a student cannot log in at the time of the exam, One Desk IT can ask the Digital Education team to set a temporary password for the duration of the exam.

Before the exam

Print a copy of the M42-Moodle Quiz Invigilator Checklist for the invigilators.
Display "Exam in progress" signs on the doors so other staff and students don't interrupt the exam.
Notify students to ensure they open the Course Index on the left and open the block drawer on the right for navigation and to see timers.

Recommended Moodle Quiz Settings

Moodle Course Access: Please be aware that all tutors and course administrators that have access to the course will be able to see the quiz questions and answers. If this is a problem, you can request a new Moodle course be set up for the exam that provides only those who need it with access to the exam questions.

Description: This functions as an introduction and should include the scoring rules, number and types of questions and the time limit. If some students will receive extra time, this should also be mentioned. If using numeric questions, it should be clear whether students need to enter the unit as well as the number. This should ideally be mentioned in every question it applies to as well.

You may add some additional standard text such as the statements below, that explain to students how their Moodle exam will work. You can copy and paste these into the Description text box as appropriate:

You won't be negatively marked for incorrect answers, so you should attempt to answer all questions.
Moodle will save your answers each time you click to the next question.
Students can open the Course Index on the left and open the block drawer on the right for navigation.
If you want to revisit a question you may click on the Flag question link in the grey box beside it, or write down its question/page number, so that you can easily return to it. Note: only include the second option in this statement if your students will have paper to write on in the exam.
When you have finished press [Submit all and finish] - You will need to confirm you want to finish. Once you confirm, you will not be able to re-enter that exam attempt!

Open the quiz: Ensure the quiz availability times are accurate.

Close the quiz: We recommend disabling the quiz close time, as a count-down timer will automatically appear for the last hour the quiz is open, which could confuse students. If you disable the quiz close time, you must manually close the quiz after the exam, so no absent students can see the questions.

Time limit: Don't use Moodle to time invigilated exams - if there is a network problem during the exam students will lose time. Instead use the clock on the wall to manage timings manually, with invigilators announcing time as in a written examination.

When not enabling the Time limit, if there are any technical issues extra time can be easily issued without Moodle automatically submitting quiz attempts.

This also allows students, who have been granted additional time due to a disability, to complete the exam without having to grant them extra time within the Moodle quiz.

When time expires: For on-site invigilated exams, we recommend setting this to There is a grace period when open attempts can be submitted, but no more questions answered, with the grace period set to 1 week. This is to avoid non-submitted attempts from entering the 'never submitted' state, and allows a period of 1 week when the student can go back into the quiz and click submit, but not answer any further questions. This setting will help prevent questions entering the Never Submitted state which can occur if, 'Attempts must be submitted before time expires, or they are not counted' is selected. If an attempt becomes Never Submitted then it cannot be graded. If students do not select 'Submit and finish all' to complete the quiz after the grace period has elapsed, their attempt will remain in an open state. A Tutor or Course Administrator is required to intervene, and can select the 'Reopen' option next to the student's entry in the quiz results screen. Once selected, the student's attempt will be submitted.

Attempts: If this is set to more than 1, students will be able to attempt the exam more than once. The usual setting is 1.

New page: We recommend you set this to Every question.

When questions are presented in a series of pages or screens, students' responses will automatically be saved at the end of each page, ensuring that their responses are not inadvertently lost.
Also, students can easily flag a question that they wish to return to later.

Double-check questions per page by doing a quiz preview. If it still shows more than 1 question per page you will need to repaginate your quiz. To do this:

Go to the Quiz Settings tab.
Expand Layout and select Every question in the New page drop-down menu and tick the checkbox next to Repaginate now.
Click Save and display.
Click Preview quiz to check the quiz has been updated.

Shuffle within questions (shuffle answers): We recommend you change this to Yes to minimise the chance of students cheating by copying the answers of the people around them. (If enabled, the parts making up each question will be randomly shuffled each time a student attempts the quiz, provided the option is also enabled in the question settings. This setting only applies to questions that have multiple parts, such as multiple choice or matching questions.) - Please make sure that you have the questions to suit this option e.g. If an answer is None of the above, a subtle change would be None applies.

Shuffle questions: Every time the quiz is attempted, the order of the questions in this section will be shuffled into a different random order. This can make it harder for students to share answers, but it also makes it harder for students to discuss a particular question with you.

How questions behave: This should be set to Deferred feedback, meaning that students do not get to see when they have answered a question incorrectly. All feedback is deferred until after the quiz has been submitted and graded (and only available then based on the Review Options).

Review Options: All review options should be unticked. Once unticked, this will default to 'The attempt' being available 'During the attempt' only. If you choose to allow students to see their exam attempts later, you can change the Review Options after the exam has concluded and the results analysed by the teaching staff.

Untick Review Options Review Options after saving

Password: Adding a password can ensure only students in the room can complete the exam.

Use a password that is easy to enter, but hard to guess e.g. "purple".
Only use lowercase letters.
Avoid special characters.
If the password is easy to enter students will be more likely to all start their quiz at the same time.

Completion conditions : Ensure this is set to None.

Moodle Exam guard

Exam guard will prevent course admins from editing their course from 10 minutes before the start of a Moodle quiz until 10 minutes after the quiz has finished. Exam guard does this by looking at the “Open the quiz”/ “Close the quiz” setting when a Moodle quiz is created. The course editing freeze will only apply where the Moodle quiz is open for less than 5 hours as it is designed to target Moodle quizzes being used for controlled condition exams.

A banner will appear at the top of your course when Exam guard is in effect.

Exam guard will work automatically and should have no impact on the majority of workflows. You can still post to forums, and mark submissions in other assignments. You can also add user overrides for late minute ECs and SORA students to a quiz. However, except for extending the exam end time for students in the process of taking the exam, by clicking the Extend time button, you will be unable to edit the course or create/edit activities in the course while the exam is running.

You will no longer be able to manually unhide and release a Moodle quiz by making the quiz visible at the exam start time. This workflow is not recommended or required. A better approach is for staff to set the Moodle “Open the quiz” setting to the exam start date and time when creating the quiz. Students will see the quiz item on Moodle but will be unable to access the questions or begin the quiz before the open date and time so there is no risk of the exam being released early.

Back

On the day of the exam

Immediately before the exam starts:

Remind students of the exam conditions, and how they can ask for assistance if something goes wrong.
We recommend students use the Moodle web interface on all devices, not the Moodle app which is unsupported.
Help line: make a note of the number to call during the exam if you experience any technical problems.
- Call One Desk IT on 020 7679 5000 (Ext: 25000 within UCL).
Identity checking: Ask students to bring their UCL photo ID cards and check this off on the attendance sheet.
Logging in: Ask students to log in to Moodle as they arrive and navigate to the exam to begin reading the exam guidance.
- Exam guidance will inform students of the scoring rules, number and types of questions, any navigation constraints and the time limit.
- Note: Students may not be able to access the quiz until you give them the quiz password.
- Allow 5-10 minutes before the exam for large groups to log in, and ask students to stagger logins where possible to avoid performance issues.
- Allow extra time: If you are manually timing students (as recommended) you can make a note of any extra time a student needs due to a technical issue or other reason.
- If you are using a timed exam you will need to amend time settings, for individual users with extra time, via the User overrides option in the quiz Settings menu.

During the exam:

When the exam starts, write/project the quiz password on a board, as well as reading it out loud, so students can enter it correctly.
We recommend students use the Moodle web interface on all devices, not the Moodle app which is unsupported.

At the end of the exam:

It is essential to ensure that all students have submitted their responses before they leave the room - otherwise (a) they may be able to re-open and complete the exam from another location, and (b) they may not receive a mark for the test.
You can use the Report inside the quiz from the Results tab to see who has not yet submitted their responses - those who have not submitted will have 'In progress' in the State column and a '-' in the Completed column.

If the entire group remains in the room until the end of the exam, then it will be easy to spot any open tests from the grader report, as they will be the ones without a score.
If students ask to leave early it is advisable to check their individual record in the Grader Report.
If you do discover that a student has left without submitting their answers, please contact Digital Education (via One Desk IT) for advice.

After the exam:

Moodle provides statistics on your results and quiz questions, including a calculation of the discrimination efficiency of each question. You can access the report from in the quiz ( Results > Statistics ). For further information see the Moodle Docs page.

Troubleshooting:

If you suspect that there has been a problem with security or cheating during the exam, please contact Digital Education who will be able to advise you on how to proceed.
If there are widespread technical problems during the exam, you should use the 'Extend time' button to extend time to students for whom the exam is in progress, so they are not disadvantaged.
If you need to extend time for an individual student only, you should use the User override option.
If you are having problems during a digital examination call One Desk IT on 020 7679 5000 (Ext: 25000 within UCL).

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