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.

If you are running an invigilated exam using a Moodle quiz, please see the invigilated online exam guidance.
Quiz-specific information is preceded by ( ).

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".

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 and ISD can complete any necessary checks on your Moodle quiz settings and/or room.

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 our team MAY be able to assist you on the day (given enough notice). Please note: These members of staff are not a replacement for invigilators.

DO NOT schedule your exam during a planned Moodle outage or maintenance window. Currently, the window for Moodle maintenance is 1am – 4am GMT / 2am – 5am BST weekday mornings. Exact maintenance days will be communicated on the News ticker of the Moodle homepage and ISD news. You can also check the Moodle news ticker on the Moodle home page for any planned outages.

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.

AVOID editing the settings of the Moodle course or its activities while students are actively undertaking 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.

Moodle Quiz - Activity Completion - please note if you have enabled Activity completion, then 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.

On this page:

In advance of the exam - checklist

6 weeks before

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

4 weeks before

Setup and check your quiz settings against the Moodle Quiz settings below.
If it is your first time running a Moodle quiz, you can ask Digital Education to check Quiz settings in advance.

Notify Digital Education. Please ensure you complete the Moodle Exam Notification Form with at least four weeks' notice, before the exam is scheduled to take place, to allow sufficient time to make necessary arrangements.

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 must ensure they open the Course Index on the left and open the block drawer on the right for navigation and to see timers.
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!
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.

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:

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. 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. - This option is found in edit quiz,

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.

Activity completion setting 'Require view': Student must view this activity to complete it. Ensure this is not selected.

Activity completion settings with require view selected

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, you will not be able to edit course settings or create or edit activities in their 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 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 can 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 the ISD Service Desk. If on the day a student cannot log in, please contact the Digital Education team, who will be able to set a temporary password for the length 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 to ensure they open the Course Index on the left and open the block drawer on the right for navigation and to see timers.
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:

Periodically monitor the exam, and use the Announcement or a Discussion Forum to communicate any updates to the quiz, or answer any common queries, so that all students on the course can see the answer.
In an emergency, if a user is experiencing technical problems direct them to contact the ISD Service Desk on 020 7679 5000 (Ext: 25000 within UCL).

At the end of 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 technical problems, you should allow extra time for students to complete the exam, so they are not disadvantaged.
If you are having problems during a digital examination call the ISD Service Desk on 020 7679 5000 (Ext: 25000 within UCL).

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