Best practices for online assessment

For exams with higher stakes, online remote proctoring is available. Respondus is integrated with the Quiz tool in WebCampus. Faculty and students access Respondus directly from their courses on WebCampus. Please see the Online Test Proctoring page for more information on Respondus and how it may be used in your class.

Please keep in mind that there is no requirement for proctored exams in this period of remote instruction. Some instructors may choose instead to require a take-home essay exam, a term paper, or student presentation to take the place of a proctored test. If you’d like to discuss options or brainstorm ways to translate your face-to-face assessment strategies into the online environment, please contact odl@unr.edu.

Recommendations for online quiz/test design

The following recommendations are intended to help develop quiz/tests that are more difficult to be cheated.

  • Randomize questions: This setting randomizes the order in which the questions appear to students. This may make it harder for students to confer with peers as they progress through the test, as each student will be presented with questions in a different order.
  • Shuffle answers: This setting will randomize the order in which answer choices appear in multiple choice questions. This will make it harder for students to quickly share answers.
  • Limit quiz completion time: This setting will limit the amount of time each student has to complete the test. This makes it harder for students to search the internet or contact friends for help.
  • Require the entire class to take the test at the same time: Requiring the test to take place during the regularly-scheduled class session will make it harder for students to complete the test, then tell their peers what was on the test. If everyone takes it at the same time, there is less time to share answers.
  • Deliver one question at a time: This setting will only show students one question on the screen at a time. Students must click next in order to move to the next question. This makes it harder to copy and paste the entire test into a file to share with peers. You may also choose to lock questions once they have been answered, meaning students can’t go back in the test to change answers after moving forward.
  • Use a question bank (if possible): A question bank would make it possible to provide a large number of questions, from which a smaller number of questions are randomly assigned to each student. For example, you may have 20 questions from chapter 2 of your text; you can put these 20 questions in a bank, and then direct the bank to randomly assign each student 10 of those questions. This will make it so no two students will have the exact same 10 questions. This also makes it possible to randomize the order in which questions are presented to students.

WebCampus quizzes

Note that exams and quizzes are both called "Quizzes" in WebCampus. Please see the following Canvas Guides for more information and step-by-step tutorials on using the Quizzes tool:

Question types

The following question types are available in WebCampus Quizzes. Click on each link to learn more about the question type and how to create questions of that type in WebCampus.