Why Use Blackboard: Quizzes and Exams for Assessment or Self-Assessment

Blackboard includes as part of its suite of tools a Test Manager that provides a very easy way to create online exams and quizzes for your students to take via Blackboard. When you create an exam or quiz in Blackboard, the program also creates an entry for the exam/quiz in the Grade Center for your class. If the exam/quiz consists of questions with answers that can be specified in advance - in other words, multiple choice, true/false, multiple answer, ordering, matching, or fill in the blank questions - then the Blackboard server will grade the exams for you and enter the students' grades into the Grade Center, for subsequent viewing by you and by your students. (Each student can view only his/her grades and not those of classmates. You, of course, see all the grades for your students.) If your exam has long-answer questions in addition to (or instead of) question types with pre-specified correct answers, Blackboard will grade the questions that it can, and it will wait for you to grade the other questions manually before finalizing the students' grades on the assessment.

If you give frequent or occasional quizzes for your course, Blackboard can reduce your grading workload significantly, without reducing the effectiveness of the feedback you would provide by grading the exams yourself. As part of the exam/quiz creation process, Blackboard allows you to provide feedback for correct and incorrect answers, and even for particular answer choices. In your feedback for incorrect answers, you can provide comments and/or direct students to the appropriate readings that they need to review to understand how to answer the question correctly. Since Blackboard allows you to choose the level of feedback provided to students - ranging from providing just the score to providing the score, correct answers, and detailed feedback - you can also create Blackboard tests as self-assessments for the students, providing immediate feedback to the students as to what they did and did not answer correctly. In the Grade Center, you can modify the settings for the self-assessments, indicating that the scores will not be included in Grade Center calculations, although the results will be listed for you and the students to see. Blackboard also offers a test option that will totally hide the grade from the instructor and from the Grade Center, although we strongly recommend not using that option, since you can't change your mind once students have taken the test, or you'll wipe out all the results.

After your students have taken the quiz/exam, Blackboard provides detailed statistics about how students responded to particular questions, helping you assess areas of student confusion in the material covered by the exam.

Please note that if you want students to take quizzes or exams in Blackboard, you'll need to schedule time in a computer lab (for a proctored exam) or to make the exam available during a particular time window, especially if you are worried about cheating. When posting the exam in a course area and setting options for the exam, you can indicate the time when the exam becomes available and the time when it is no longer available to students. For self-assessments, you can allow students to take the exam once or multiple times, and for such self-assessments, you probably wouldn't set a time window.

For instructions on how to create exams and quizzes in Blackboard, see Creating a Test.

Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 12, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.