Exams are high stakes assessments that are stressful. What can you do to reduce the problems your students can experience taking Blackboard tests? Lots, both from an instructor perspective and from a student perspective.

Instructors:

1. Provide students with the opportunity to practice and get familiar with the Blackboard test system or to get comfortable with their knowledge of the content.
   • Have a practice test for checking settings that is set to unlimited attempts and no credit allows students to check their browsers before starting a test.
   • Create practice tests to reduce testing anxiety before an in class exam. Blackboard has a test option to allow practice tests that don’t show the results in the Grade Center. Students can take a practice test without fear that an instructor “will see their poor results.” Setting the practice test for unlimited attempts allows the students to take the test multiple times to gain confidence and identify content areas requiring additional review.
2. Set a time limit but do not select forced completion. The Blackboard timer does not stop if the student exits and returns to the test. If a student does have a problem they can get right back in. Under these circumstances the student’s time should not exceed the time limit or if it does it might be by a few minutes – the time it took to reconnect. But if a student enters an exam, looks at the questions, exits to find answers, and reenters, the timer still runs and you can see how long the student took from initially clicking the link to the test until they finally submit the test. So if a student clicks on the link for a test with a one hour time limit at 2 PM on Wednesday afternoon and looks at the questions then exits and looks up all the answers and reenters the test at 8 PM to answer the questions and finishes at 8:30 PM, their total elapsed time is 6.5 hours – well over the 1 hour limit. You can now take appropriate action.
3. Require students to report any problems taking the test to you immediately. Then if a student requests a test reset, you can see from the test access log when the student started the test, how long they spent in the test before the “problem” occurred, what questions they accessed, and which questions were saved. Based on what you see you can decide whether you will honor the request or if a penalty should be applied. If a student reports a problem and goes over the time limit by only a few minutes, you’ll see evidence to back that claim up.When setting time limits, there is an option to have the test auto-submit when the time limit is reached. A caution here is that if a student has had a problem, their test will submit when the time from first access is reached and they will not have any additional time to make up for having to reenter the test. Time limits can also be a problem for students receiving additional time on tests as an accommodation for a disability. For those students you will need to set up testing exceptions to give them additional time.
4. Create pools of questions and let students have multiple attempts. You can choose to average the results, or have the highest grade count. Because the test is pulled from a pool or pools of questions, students will see different questions each time they take the test. (See related post on pool size and question repeats.) So even if they look up the answers from the first attempt, because the questions on the second attempt will be different, students don’t gain much by taking the test again.
5. Don’t get tripped up by the time of day. Blackboard considers midnight as the start of the day. When setting the start and end times for a test and you want the time to be midnight – select either 11:59 PM or 12:01 AM to be sure the exam starts or ends when you think it should. Using times on either side of midnight means you don’t have to remember how Blackboard defines it.

There are ways to reduce cheating without using forced completion. Take advantage of the tools that can help you manage the normal and reasonable problems students might encounter without being overly restrictive.

Students:

1. If your instructor provides a practice tests, take it before each scheduled test to make sure your browser settings will allow you to access and complete tests in Blackboard.
2. Browser updates and plugins can affect the performance of the testing system. Since browsers are updated regularly and users add plugins to gain functions something in your set-up may have changed between tests.
3. See the StudentTestBestPractice Handout for a checklist.