For many schools, final grades are just around the corner. How can you use your Brightspace Learning Environment to help lighten the assessment load and ensure your students have timely feedback about their final marks?
Use the Quizzes tool to Grade Exams Efficiently
Moving your final exam online has several benefits, including:
- Automatic Grading: To save you time, Brightspace can automatically grade most types of exam questions, like multiple choice, true/false, and matching questions. For written response (long-answer or essay) questions, which can’t be automatically graded, you can use the Hide learners' names option to anonymize their responses and ensure unbiased grading.
- Security: To ensure that your exam stays secure, you can use restrictions like availability dates, passwords, and IP restrictions to ensure that learners can only complete an exam under specific conditions. You can also shuffle questions within the quiz and set up random sections, allowing different students to receive different questions from a specific category or section.
- Accessibility: For students who need accommodations, set up Special Access to provide different dates, time limits, and number of attempts. You can also use the HTML editor when creating or editing quiz questions to present information in multiple ways – including video and audio instructions – to support all learning styles.
- Quiz Statistics: Use the quiz statistics tool to review student performance on the course exam and catch any issues quickly. For example, a high number of students achieving “0” on a quiz question could point to an issue with the question itself. The export feature allows you to share exam statistics with school administrators easily.
Ready to get started with the Quizzes tool? Check out the Quizzes Tool for Instructors video tutorials or the Quizzes documentation in Community.
Provide Detailed Feedback with the Assignments tool
If your students are completing summative projects instead of a final exam, you can use the Assignments tool to improve the grading process by:
- Creating rubrics to support student performance and assessment: Rubrics can be developed and shared with students in advance to provide them with guidelines that they can use to be successful. When grading assignments, simply use the expectations and feedback created in advance and edit appropriately to personalize for each learner. Learn more about rubrics in the Using Rubrics documentation in Community.
- Using annotations to provide detailed feedback: You can mark up assignment submissions using highlighting, free hand drawing, shapes, and text comments. Once you publish the feedback, your students can see their assignment with your annotations, providing additional context for their grade.
Do you have other tips and strategies for assessing student work? Please share in the comments!
Kassia Kukurudza, Senior Advisory Consultant