In this example, we’re going to take a look at a quiz or exam that students might take home over a period of time, perhaps starting at 5 pm on Friday and due at 8 am on Monday. Because of the way these quizzes are connected with the calendar in VSTAR, we need to set them up a little bit differently in the system.
If none of the features are enabled, and an open time is not set, and access to the quiz is not restricted by other means, the quiz will be available to the students as soon as it is built, so please follow these instructions carefully.
The Timing Section
For take home quizzes, we are most concerned with setting how long students have to take a quiz, and what happens when the quiz is over. As you can see in the example below, we only need to set three things: the closing date and time, a time limit, and what happens when the quiz expires.
1) Close the quiz. Click the “Enable” check box, and set the exact date and time that students should no longer have access to complete the quiz.
2) Set the time limit. Click the “Enable” check box if you would like to set a time limit for the quiz. If a student has all weekend to sit down to take a quiz, it may be beneficial to restrict them to a set time limit to complete the quiz once they sit down to take it. If you choose to set this option, make sure when you create the instructions for the quiz (in the quiz description) you indicate to your students the time limit for the quiz. Also, the close time supersedes the time limit. So, if you set 1 hour as the time limit for the quiz, the quiz closes at 2 pm, and a student sits down to take the quiz at 1:59 pm, he will only have 1 minute to take the quiz, not the full hour.
3) Set what the system will do when time expires. The default option is that “Open attempts are submitted automatically.” The best practice is to leave this default setting in place. This will ensure that if a student has not submitted the exam when the time runs out, their attempted answers will be scored. The student will not be able to answer any more questions, but the answers they have completed will be submitted by the system. Another option includes “There is a grace period when open attempts can be submitted, but no more questions answered.” If this is selected, the student has to actually click the submit button when the time expires. The last option is “Attempts must be submitted before time expires, or they are not counted.” If this selected, if students have not submitted their answers, they will not be scored. This can cause a problem if there are technical glitches during the exam, so this selection is not recommended.
The Restrict Access Section
This section sets when the quiz will open to students, and whether students will see the quiz before that time. As you can see from the example below, you only need to be concerned with two settings.
1) Allow access from. Click the “Enable” check box, and set the exact date and time that students should have access to begin the quiz in the VSTAR Learn system.
2) Before activity can be accessed. The default setting is “Show activity greyed-out, with restriction information.” The best practice is to keep this setting, so that students will be aware that there is a quiz coming, and when it will start. The other option is “Hide activity entirely,” but this is not very useful during a take-home exam. It might be useful if you are creating a pop-quiz to be offered during class.