Blackboard Tests: rounding and other quicks

Defining accuracy

If you were marking a question that asked for the area of a circle with radius 1 where you’d specified accuracy of within 5% and were expecting an answer of 3.14 you’d probably also accept 3.142 or 3.1416. Turns out that Blackboard tests checks the rounding first and if it’s not to the correct number of significant figures it’s automatically marked as incorrect. That’s fine once you know but a massive pain the first time you forget to tell students the accuracy level needed!

The horse before the cart

I’d like to say that assessment should be all about what you want to achieve and not the tool that you are using. In practice though knowing the way something works and limitations is important for being able to design good questions. A bit of both is probably needed where you work within and sometimes around the tools to make an assessment that gets as close to what you want to achieve as possible. I checked an awful lot of Blackboard tests that came into the help desk and the best one I saw was one where they’d used a variety of question types to really good effect with random numbers, multiple choice and explanations.

Finding the quirks and limits

Working out the quicks of tools takes time and lots of patience and creativity to come up with all of the possible things that might be asked. Time wasn’t really something we had a lot of when getting the summer assessments online fast. Luckily staff from across faculties have been flagging things up contributing to a Google doc of hints and tips which has proved invaluable. A few weeks ago after I’d spent time trying suggestions, answering questions and checking workarounds from people I felt like it was pretty much complete. It’s been written up into a help page for our website. This is the link to the page if you’d like to avoid some of the common mistakes. Of course since then I’ve done 2 digital advice slots where people have brought interesting questions that we’ve found workarounds for so I guess it won’t ever be complete. If you find something or have a question get in touch because the more we can share the better.