quiz accommodation- breaks
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I'm an admin at a grad school, and we are seeking a way to administer the "take breaks during a test" accommodation. A workaround suggested by another user was to just extend the overall time. However, in this case the student has up to 24 hours to take the test, and a mechanism is needed to pause and then restart the test without leaving it open. What options are available?
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If you haven't found it yet, Standard for Extending Time on Quizzes is a good review of existing functionality.
Is your 24 hours the availability window to take the exam or the time they have to take the exam once they start? If this is in a proctored situation, then giving someone 24 hours sounds challenging. Since I'm not familiar with that accommodation, how long do they get to leave for? Is it for a few minutes or can they leave and come back the next day?
With Classic Quizzes, students can leave without submitting and come back and the timer will keep running. You can close the page if needed and when they come back, they will see "Resume Quiz". If the exam is proctored and it needs to be finished within a single day, then you may want to extend the time for that student to accommodate for the breaks. Since you don't know how long or frequent those might be, you could set it to something like 8 hours and then let the proctor keep track of the time. Of course, you would need to explain to the student that they really don't have 8 hours to take the exam.
Another option is to put the test into a separate accommodations course where the proctors have the ability to moderate the exams. Then, you set the time limit (they probably have a time accommodation as well) and let them start the exam. When they leave, you track the time and then the proctor goes in and moderates the exam to add extra time for what they missed when they get back. You just need to be sure that the quiz doesn't end while they are gone, so the proctor may need to add lots of extra time at the start of the break and then remove some when they come back.
If you want to make sure that the student is not working on the quiz while they are on their break, you can either use the honor system or check the quiz logs. I have not tested this, but it may be possible to create a separate course for accommodation testing, have the student start the quiz, and then close the window when they leave. Now, edit the quiz and change the access code so that they cannot access it while they are gone.
The ability to pick up a quiz where a student left off has been a long-time feature that did not get implemented for Classic Quizzes.
With New Quizzes, things are a little different. Let me start with the disclaimer that I try not to look at New Quizzes, so I may get something wrong.
They have an option called "build on last attempt". This isn't what you want. Students could submit when they have to take a break and then continue when they come back. However, it allows students to take a quiz again and answer the questions they missed the first time. This would include questions they answered incorrectly the first time. It would also restart the timer.
New Quizzes provides some more flexibility in some areas. The How do I moderate a student's quiz attempt in New Quizzes? lesson explains that you can reopen a student's quiz attempt. It says that previous answers are retained and the quiz timer resumes from its remaining time on the previous submission. Sounds awesome and exactly what someone would want, right? Except for the disclaimer that reopening or adding time to an in-progress quiz is not possible.
As part of the third quarter 2024 (July-Sep 2024 -- so now), they are beginning to work on bringing the ability to add additional time to a quiz in progress. That's a vague timeline -- beginning to work on it. They mentioned that if a student was interrupted due to technical or unforeseen issues, you could add additional time while in progress. You could give a student an hour, let them take a break, and then extend the time they get. The sad thing, this is another of those areas where existing functionality didn't get ported over to New Quizzes.
So how do you pause an in-progress New Quiz? I don't know. It sounds like the student would have to start the quiz close to the available until time and have time left on the clock when the quiz closed. Of course, that's a bad practice to do and you have no way of knowing when the break was going to happen -- if at all.
If you feel that I haven't answered your question, I don't know that there is a perfect answer. There's a whole lot of things that don't work and a few things with Classic Quizzes that might. Some other people might have ideas, though. I don't have this issue in my classes (I teach face-to-face and my quizzes in Canvas are untimed and students have several days to take them), so this isn't my area of expertise.
