Designing bCourses Quizzes for Academic Integrity

November 24, 2020

About

This document is intended to help instructors design online quizzes in bCourses that minimize the opportunity for academic integrity violations.

The quiz tools in bCourses, Gradescope, and other platforms may make it easier to replace a few high-stakes assessments with more, lower-stakes assessments, lowering the incentive for students to cheat on a few, high-stakes instances.

Methods

Add time constraints

Students may be likely to share answers if a quiz is available for a long period of time, or is configured to allow some students to complete it before others. You can set a time limit, and/or an availability window to limit a student's ability to share answers with classmates.

There are two ways to add time constraints:

  1. Add a time limit: Once a time limit is enabled for a quiz, a timer will start as soon as the student begins the quiz. The quiz will automatically submit once the timer runs out.

time limit setting for bCourses quiz

Enable a time limit from on quiz settings page. Quiz settings can be viewed by navigating to your quiz and selecting "Edit."

  1. Add "Available from" and "Until" dates: This will create an availability window. Students will not be able to access the quiz before or after this window. If you create a wide window for a quiz that will allow some students to complete the quiz earlier than others, you may wish to also take some of the steps below so that a student completing the quiz earlier cannot share their answers.

bcourses quiz availability settings

"Available from" and "Until" dates are also enabled from the quiz settings page

Accommodations for time constraints

Certain students may require additional time to complete a quiz, or may need to complete a quiz at different times. 

Time limits: 

See detailed instructions

Availability windows: 

Once you set a start/end/due date for the class, you can add additional start/end/due dates for specific sections or individual sections by using the “+Add” button at the end of the assignment/quiz settings page.

Adding a second availability window

This button will allow you to set differentiated availability dates for specific students or sections

Shuffle answer order for multiple choice questions

By default, multiple choice answers will appear in the order that the instructor enters them. This means that if the correct answer for one student is “B,” the correct answer for all students for that same questions is “B.” Enabling the setting to shuffle answers will mean that the correct answer for one student could be “B” while it could be A, C, or D for other students.

Note that if you have contextual multiple choice answers, such as “all of the above” or “A and C” you would not want to shuffle answers. 

shuffle answer setting in bcourses quizzes

To randomize answer order, check the Shuffle Answers checkbox on your quiz settings page.

See this page for more information about the shuffle answers and other quiz settings

Randomize question order

By default, quiz questions will display in the same order displayed on the question editing page. If you’d like your questions to appear in a random order, you can place them in one or more question groups. We recommend adding questions of similar style, challenge, and point value to a question group. You may consider creating a question group for each section of your quiz, e.g. multiple choice question group, short answer question group, essay question group.

creating a question group in bcourses quizzes

To randomize question order, (1) create a question group, (2) create questions inside the group (or drag/import existing questions into the group)

 editing a question group

(3) Configure the question group to display all the questions in the group (e.g. if the question group contains 3 questions, configure the group to show 3 questions.)

Randomize the questions that compose the quiz

Taking the previous method one step further, you can populate a quiz with more questions than will appear on any individual student’s quiz. You can then configure the quiz to select questions randomly. For example, if you want each quiz to include 5 multiple choice questions, you might create 10 possible questions, and configure your quiz to pick 5 at random, and display them to students in a random order.

To randomize questions that compose the quiz, create one or more question groups as above, populate them with more questions than you wish to appear on any single quiz, and configure the group to only display the number of questions you wish to appear on each quiz.

See this resource for more detailed instructions on creating randomized quizzes.

Programmatically generate equation-based questions

If your quiz has formula based questions, you can generate a range of variables to easily create different variations of a question, so that each student will receive a unique variation of the question.

See this resource for detailed instructions on creating formula questions.

Resources

Workshop Slide Deck

Vendor Quiz Documentation

Berkeley Academic Senate: Best Practices for Remote Examinations

Contact

If you have additional questions about designing quizzes for academic integrity, please contact the DLS team (bcourseshelp@berkeley.edu) or the Center for Teaching and Learning (teaching@berkeley.edu).