Faculty frequently ask us to “turn off the internet” in their classroom, so that they can administer a test without allowing students to look up information online, or to access AI systems that could “help” those students write “better.” Unfortunately, we can’t just turn off the wireless network so precisely or easily. During Honors exams, we use a very expensive software tool to isolate the student writing experience from other software or network resources. That tool is too expensive to deploy more universally and requires a lot of support work behind the scenes to make things works as smoothly as they appear to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faculty also complain about having to grade student hand-written work, particularly as many K-12 schools had reduced or eliminated their instruction on cursive writing over the past decade or so. So how can one offer an exam that’s both reasonable for students to write, while also producing work that faculty can grade?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more general use, Moodle comes with an alternative tool, Safe Exam Browser<\/a>, that can do many of the same things that the Honors exam software does. And it can be installed by students on their own computers, so that faculty are not limited to just the computer classrooms for such exams the way we are with the Honors approach. This software tool, which is downloaded by the user, can, when configured properly, limit any other software tools from running on that computer during an exam or quiz. To access it, you need to use the Quiz activity in Moodle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We strongly recommend that if you do want to use a tool like this with one of your classes, that you test it with one or more practice exams first. You’ll also need to make sure that your students all have laptop computers they can bring to class, if you’re not in one of the computer classrooms on campus. And please, be aware that software control on a computer, does not prevent a student from accessing content on other devices they may have available, including their phone, a tablet, or another computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information on how to set up Safe Exam Browser, please see our KnowledgeBase (KB)<\/a> articles in the Moodle<\/a> section on Evaluating Student Work<\/a>: Safe Exam Browser<\/a> and Safe Exam Browser Settings Recommendations<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As always, please consult with your friendly neighborhood Academic Technologist<\/a>, or put a ticket into our help system<\/a>. If you have concerns about administering a quiz or test in class for students with accommodations, please consult with Student Disability Services<\/a>, and know that we’re working on ways to allow Safe Exam Browser to work with screen-reading software too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"