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Assessment Best Practices
Assessment Best Practices:
Here are a few helpful tips when administering an assessment:
- Students should not take an assessment or try to interact online via a slow dial-up modem connection or otherwise unreliable connection.
- A “practice” text and/or question set should be given prior to an assessment to help students learn the steps in completing an actual assessment. You can create a multiple-attempt assessment or brief sample assessment that students use as practice.
- Assessments with many questions should probably not be delivered on one page. If the whole assessment is on one page, it is likely that students will experience a browser timeout after 60 minutes or so, and all student responses will be lost. Instead, we recommend creating an assessment with each question on a separate page. This way the student has to click [Save and Continue] to advance through the assessment. Each time the student clicks [Save and Continue] their answers are stored directly to our server. If anything happens to their assessment, their answers have been recorded and can be retrieved.If this option is not for you, you can break your assessment into parts and present the assessment one part at a time. This option is available under “Settings>Assessment Organization>Question Layout>Each question is on a separate web page/Each Part is on a separate web page.”
- Allow a few more minutes on timed assessments to accommodate students with slower Internet connections.
- Students should be responsible and accountable for the reliability/performance of their own personal computing environments.
- Student computers should be free of viruses, adware/spyware, etc. which may inhibit their browser/computer from completing an assessment. A piece of malware may take over the browser and navigate students to a different website. There are free versions of adware and spyware removers available for download off of the Internet. Ad-Aware from Lavasoft will remove adware and Spybot Search and Destroy will remover spyware from computers. A simple Google search will point you to free downloads of the software mentioned above. Texas State students are also able to download a free virus scan program from Texas State. Please visit the Technology Resources homepage at http://www.tr.txstate.edu to download the software. If students think that their computer may have a virus or malware, please contact ITAC at 512.245.4822.
- If you used an imported assessment from Blackboard it is recommended that you verify all questions in your assessment for legacy problems. Some question types in Blackboard are formatted differently in TRACS.
For questions, contact ETC Support at 245.5566. You can also email us at tracs@txstate.edu.
For the TRACS website home page, go to: http://tracs.txstate.edu/portal/login
If your login fails and you need help with your Net ID or password, contact ITAC at 245.4822.