Guideline for Moodle Online Quizzes  

Course Instructor Tasks
Recommendations for Genral Security
Moodle Settings Recommendations

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1. Contact the lab administrators to reserve the rooms at least 30 minutes before exam start time. And check with them that the students are given access privileges to the computers.
    

2. Before the quiz day, conduct a dummy quiz among the students for practicing purposes.
    

3. If the number of expected students per single round is less or equal to 200, you can deliver the quiz during AUB working hours (Monday-Friday, between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm).
   
   Otherwise, it is recommended to deliver the quiz after 5:00 pm or on weekends in order not to face a high load on the Moodle server which might cause low performance and computers freezing.
    

4. An online quiz can’t be run without at least one proctor per lab. ACC members’ role in the quiz is only Moodle/Moodle technical concerns and not (proctoring, spreading draft papers, taking the attendance, students’ seating)
    

5. Only the real quiz should be available in the Moodle course. 
    

6. Always make sure that the students would be tight on time while solving the quiz, so that they won’t have time to think of anything other than the quiz.
    

7. Send email to proctors with instructions about how the quiz is delivered and emphasize that they should be there before time.
    

8. When creating an essay question, either type your text directly in Moodle or copy/paste from (Microsoft Word, Notepad, WordPad). It is not recommended using HTML editor such as MS FrontPage.

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1. Students should receive a computer presenting the Moodle login page in full screen.  They are expected to login to their courses, open the quiz tool and wait for the release of the password to open the quiz.  After the password is released, they take the quiz.  As soon as they click “Submit all and finish” they should log off the course and not touch the computer keyboard anymore.
    

2. During the quiz time, students are not allowed to open other pages of the course, surf the internet, get screen shots, send emails, etc.  They are expected to remain on the quiz environment only. 
    

3. Proctors should be aware of all security rules and enforce them.  And they should not spread out passwords.
    

4. If you want to restrict access to the quiz to certain computer labs. Contact the Moodle system administrator to get the list of IP addresses for the lab computers.
    

5. Only the course instructor should know the passwords for the various sessions. Quiz password should only be announced when all the labs are set and all students are ready to take the quiz by the professor. Passwords of new session, should not relate to the old session password. (Randomize choice of passwords).
    

6. Proctors should take full responsibility concerning quiz security, taking attendance, and matching between AUB IDs and logged in accounts taking the quiz. They should come before the students arrive to help in evacuating the labs and in order to help direct the students to the labs. All proctors in each site should also meet with the ACC staff responsible for that certain site to be informed of all the instructions.
   
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1. If you have a Glossary in your course, go through each one, check the settings and switch Automatically link glossary entries to “No”. Don’t forget to switch it back after the quiz.
    

2. Special tips for Essay questions:
   a. Ask your students to click Save without submitting while they are typing
       in the essay questions.
   b. Select your quiz to have one question per page so that an HTML editor will
       appear with each essay question.
    

3. Check the availability of the quiz (Open the quiz/Close the quiz) to exceed the Time limit in the quiz settings. Ex. If the time limit of the quiz is 30 minutes, make sure to open the quiz for 60 minutes.
    

4. If Shuffle answer is selected, double check MC (multiple choice) questions if any has an option like “All of the above” or “None of the above”…etc and replace with “All options” or “None of these options”.
    

5. In the Quiz settings select “NO” for Adaptive mode. If this option is “Yes”, the student can take the same question many times, getting feedback and grade per question, even within the same quiz attempt. Although this is good in practice quizzes, most probably you might not want this option in a mid-term or final quiz!
    

6. Before the quiz, emphasize to the students the quiz rules: time to start; Save without submitting; submit the quiz on time.
    

7. If your quiz is running in more than one computer lab make sure not to start all sessions at the same time to avoid traffic on the server. It is recommended to have five minutes time difference between the labs.
    

8. When editing a question, make sure that you click on Save Changes. If you click on Save as new question, it means you want a duplicate of the same question! Be careful not to leave undesired duplicates if you use this option.
    

9. To keep your questions databank clean and to prevent random questions of your quiz to find the deleted questions, isolate all the deleted questions into a new category that you’ll call “Deleted questions”. To do this, create first the category “Deleted questions” than go to each category and tick [x] Also show old questions. The questions deleted will appear with a blue box next to them for restore, DON’T restore them, instead tick these questions and move them to the category “Deleted questions”.
    

10. Essay questions cannot be randomized. Whether they are mixed with other questions or put in a separate category, you cannot add them to the quiz in a random manner. You have to select which essay questions you want to add to your quiz: all students will get the same essay question(s).
     

11. Instructor should communicate with the person in charge or Moodle administrator to give the quiz password using the Messages tool and not the public Chat.
     

12. If you put all the questions of the quiz in one page (Questions per page = Unlimited), any freeze or refresh will cause the quiz answers of your student to disappear. In order to avoid that, distribute your questions into multiple pages using Page Breaks: On the Edit page of the quiz, click on [x] Show page breaks, you’ll see “Repaginate with X questions per page”. Set the X value desired and click on “Go”. This option works both for Shuffle questions = Yes or No. The new value overrides the value of “Questions per page” inside the quiz. In this case, be aware to change always the questions per page in this “Repaginate” setting, NOT inside the quiz settings.
     

13. If you do NOT want your students to check any online course material (PDF, Lectures, Documents, etc.), make sure to hide all undesired topics, resources, and activities.  Only the quiz should be available. Once the quiz is over, remember to show again the hidden topics, resources and activities.
     

14. In order to prevent students from checking the quiz score, you need to turn the feature off inside the quiz settings and also to hide the course grade book: this is done by hiding the Administration block since it’s the only place where they can see all their grades. Remember to show it again at the end of the quiz.

     
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