Writing online tests and exams
The university has some resources available via the remote learning website which cover off a number of tips for creating online tests and exams:
https://remotelearning.auckland.ac.nz/assessments/tests-and-exams/
If writing an exam using Inspera see the Inspera exam guide
You may also find the Inspera Resources helpful or refer directly to the staff inspera development hub
File Upload Questions
Many engineering questions are best suited to being handwritten rather than typed (e.g. those requiring students to write equations and/or draw diagrams). Typing equations into Inspera is time consuming and not practical.
Instead you can use a "file upload" question type, where students hand write their answers, scan them to pdf and upload them. Be aware that scanning hand written material is time consuming. Students can easily spend 20+ minutes scanning their hand written answers.
Some good general principles if using file upload questions:
- Remind students to download and practice using a smart phone app that scans to pdf, such as Adobe Scan or Genius Scan.
- Set up your Inspera question to accept only pdfs, as only pdfs render automatically (so marking other file types such as png and jpg is slower) . Also pdfs can be easily exported to mark offline
- Try to structure your questions to decrease the number of pages they will need to scan (ideally keep it under 10). 20+ pages to scan is too much.
- Use other question types to assess any material that doesn't require hand written answers (e.g. use multi-choice, short answer, essays) as a way to reduce the amount of scanning students have to do.
- Try to reduce the number of separate pdfs they will need to upload. If you have multiple markers having a pdf for each separate section that each marker will be looking after is helpful but anything more than 2 or 3 separate pdfs is going to make scanning tough. A single pdf with 10 or fewer pages will decrease the chances of things going wrong (with multiple pdfs the chances of them uploading the wrong thing to the wrong place dramatically increases)
- Be aware that question/answer booklets can significantly increase the number of pages a student has to scan. If you want them to answer in specific spaces consider providing an answer template booklet that doesn't include the questions, so they don't have to scan as much material, if the print it out and use it
- Don't rely on students having access to a printer, some of them won't. You need to be able to collect answers even if all they have is paper, pen and a smart phone.