Setting up exams for big classes

everson_50
Community Contributor

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to learn more about how others have set up exams in Canvas for rather large classes.  I teach a statistical literacy course where there are close to 1000 students.  Normally, exams are taken by students on campus, but this is obviously not an option now and might not be in the near future.  I'd like to set up exams in Canvas, and I have experience using the Quizzes tool since we use it for homework assignments.  However, I've never used it to set up bigger tests, and I was hoping to learn more about what others have done where this is concerned. 

At our campus, we don't have access to the New Quizzes tool, but I know there are ways in the Classic Quizzes tool to set up question groups and to have questions randomly chosen from those groups.  I know I can also randomly order answer options.  Are there other things that I should be thinking about?  I know that exams will need to be open book and we'd need to have them available for a good window of time (at least 24 hours) to accommodate students in different time zones.  I worry there are things I am not thinking about as I plan to set this up, and I'd love to know what others have tried and what has worked best.  Given the large number of students we have, we'll likely need to go the route of all multiple-choice exams since we'd like to be able to grade things quickly and get feedback to students in a timely manner.  I was also thinking, since this opens the door to possible cheating issues, to try to weight the exams lower than I normally would, just to discourage students from trying to be dishonest.

Thank you in advance for any tips or suggestions you might have.

Michelle

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