Creating Electronic Assessments in a Snap!

Many faculty have discovered that the electronic exam tool in a system like Bridges has a variety of benefits. To list a few:

• An electronic quiz can be used as a review tool by your students. You can set up a pool of review questions and then create a quiz that will draw a random set of questions from this pool each time a student accesses it. For example, a pool of questions could contain 30 questions and the quiz would draw out a random 10 questions. This means that every student gets a different quiz. In addition, you can set a quiz so that students can take it multiple times so students can go through it repeatedly to test their grasp of the content. You can even include feedback so that students understand why they got something wrong or right (no more multiple guess!) This strategy really helps the students focus their study on areas that are the weakest.
  
  
• If you notice that your students are coming to class ill-prepared, you can require them to take an electronic quiz before they come to class. You can set it so that the quiz becomes unavailable once class starts so that any student who has not taken it will get a zero (can be weighted as part of their participation grade if you'd like). This strategy assures that most of your students will at least skim through their reading before class.
  
  
• If you ordinarily give your students a quiz during class time, electronic quizzes are a great way to move this testing outside of class. This frees you up to dedicate the time with your students to more active learning activities.
  
  
• Pop quiz - or if you don't mind taking a few minutes out of class time, you can administer a pop quiz that will give you instant feedback on where your students are having difficulty. This strategy presupposes that all students have a laptop or other mobile device to access an online quiz.
  
  
• No more grading! If you normally use multiple choice exams, electronic quizzes or tests are a wonderful time saver in that Bridges will automatically grade the exam, produce the grade within minutes for the students (if you release the grades that way) and also record the grade in the online grade book. Students really appreciate this instant feedback.
  
  
• Continue to build question pools. Utilizing publisher test banks or your own questions, you can continue to add to your question pools from semester to semester. You can even ask students to submit questions for the pool or trade questions with your colleagues.
  
  
• Create a survey by using the same quiz template but without points. The survey will be anonymous but will aggregate all the answers so you can read through them. This is a great way to do course evaluations or to elicit opinions or preferences from your students.

So, you're probably thinking "Sure, but I bet this is a ton of work!" Well, it can be - however we purchased a site license this year for a product called Respondus that allows you to feed in quiz questions from a Word document, a publisher's testing program, or from another system like Blackboard, and automatically reformat them and upload them into your Bridges course. It can literally take minutes. How perfect is that! I think it may even be better than a scantron :)

If you are interested in installing your own copy of Respondus on your home or office computer, please send an e-mail to id@rwu.edu and request the download and passkey information. There will also be a tutorial session on using Respondus on Wednesday, October 20 from 1 - 2 p.m. For more info and to sign up, please see our October Workshop Schedule at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/rwu_bridges_workshop_10_10.htm