M12b - Moodle Quiz for non-invigilated online exams

Overview

In advance of the exam - checklist

6 weeks before

•   Remind students who require special arrangements to notify Student Support and Wellbeing.

4 weeks before

• Set up and check your quiz settings
  • Setup and check your quiz settings against the Moodle Quiz recommended 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.

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 them 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 option to write the question number down 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 and Close the quiz: Ensure that the quiz availability times are accurate, and that enough time has been provided to accommodate students in different time zones.
A count-down timer will automatically appear for the last hour the quiz is open.

Time limit: Allows you to set a timer for the quiz e.g. 60 minutes. Ensure the time length is accurate.

When time expires:  For non-invigilated exams, we recommend setting this to Open attempts are submitted automatically. This setting will 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.

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: 

1. Go to the Quiz Settings tab.
2. Expand Layout and select Every question in the New page drop-down menu and tick the checkbox next to Repaginate now.
3. Click Save and display.
4. 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. Please make sure that question answers accommodate this option e.g. If answers contain 'None of the above', a subtle change in one question could be 'None apply'. (For use the in question setting Shuffle the choices is also required to be enabled)

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. This is located via the Shuffle tick-box under the Questions menu.

How questions behave: This should be set to Deferred feedback. This means 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 so students do not see feedback until marking is finalised. If you choose to allow students to see their exam attempts later, you can change these after the exam has concluded and the results analysed by the teaching staff.

Untick Review Options:                                                                                                           Review Options once saved:

Password (Optional): Add a password ensures only students that you share the password with 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.

Moodle quiz completion setting 'None'  

Ensure this is set to None. 

Moodle Exam guard

Exam guard will prevent users 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 at quiz creation.  Students will see the quiz item on Moodle but aren’t able to access the questions or begin the quiz before the open date and time so there is no risk your exam is released early.

Back

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).

• Setup any required extra time for SORA students: If you are using a timed exam and need to give specific students additional time, you should change time settings for individual users via the User overrides option in the quiz Settings menu.

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 Digital Education to set a temporary password for the duration of the exam.

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. 
• Notify students they can open the Course Index on the left and open the block drawer on the right for navigation. 

•  If you are using a timed exam, you will need to change time settings for individual users via the User overrides option in the quiz Settings menu.

During the exam:

• Check that all students have submitted their responses.
• 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. 

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 documents 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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