[ARCHIVED] Exam time length

[boyd_denise]

How do I estimate the length of time needed for a student to take a multiple choice and T/F Exam of 71 questions? How do I keep students from spending time looking up the answers on line?

Denise

[scottdennis]

Hi Denise,

I guess how difficult or simple the questions are will affect how much time students will need in order to complete the quiz successfully.  Could you make a copy of the exam, move it to a practice space and then take it yourself to get some sense of how long?  As far as preventing people from looking up answers in the middle of taking the quiz that is going to be difficult in an unproctored environment.  You might want to inquire of your local administration whether or not they have contracted for something like Respondus Lockdown Browser.  But even then there is no way to prevent students from, say, using their phone to look up answers.  With question types where the student doesn't have to show how they got to the right answer this can be a real challenge.

[Stef_retired]

 @boyd_denise , when I was teaching, all of my courses were fully online, so I quickly made peace with the idea that students were going to search the web for answers, or discuss the quizzes with other students, or use their phones to take photos of questions, and all of those other things students can do. So I made my quizzes very low stakes (no more than 0.5% of the course grade for a 25-question multiple choice quiz), questions selected randomly from several very large question banks to reduce the possibility of two students sitting next to each other getting the same question, set the quiz to deliver one question at a time, and gave a time limit of 20 minutes. The rest of the activities in the course were created with an emphasis on higher-order learning activities. I used many of the practices Kona Jones eloquently outlines in Quiz Settings to Maximize Security‌, so have a look through that resource for other ideas.