Yes. This simplified schematic shows the main commands that are used for making tests:
This FAQ is maintained by Dan Hillman at Boston University’s Office of Distance Education. Please direct questions, comments, or additions to him. This document was last updated 16 June 2020.
1.1. Why a FAQ format? Isn’t there a manual?
We’ve found that most people can figure things out, but have questions as they go along. Rather than require you to read a dreary manual, we’ve compiled the most frequent questions we’ve received over the years. If you’d prefer, you can read the official Blackboard manual.
1.2. Who can build and edit a test?
To build a test in a course, you must have the Instructor of Record role or the Advanced Instructor role within the course.
1.3. How do I build a test?
Creating a test requires several steps in Blackboard:
- Identifying or creating the question pool that will contain the test’s questions
- Creating questions in the question pool
- Configuring question settings in the question pool
- Creating the test
- Creating question sets for the test
- Configuring the test’s settings
- Deploying the test
1.4. Is there an overview?
Yes. This simplified schematic shows the main commands that are used for making tests:
2.1. What is a question pool?
It is a place to keep all your questions, whether or not they are currently in use. Questions in question pools can be used in tests.
2.2. Why should I create questions in a pool rather than in a test?
First, it’s a safe place to store questions. If your question is in a test and you delete the test, it’s gone. Second, if it’s linked from a pool to a test, it can be unlinked and reused some other time. If you want to use the same question in more than one version of a test, you can do that too. For example, some professors like to end every test with a zero-point-essay question where students can submit comments about the test. If that question is in the pool, it only has to be created once, and can be linked to every test in the course.
2.3. How do I go into a pool?
Under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Course Tools, then Tests, Surveys, and Pools. Click Pools. If there isn’t a pool, you can make one by clicking Build Pool. If one does exist, you can go into it by clicking the arrow that appears when you hover your cursor to the right of its name and select Edit.
2.4. Should all my questions be in one pool?
It depends on how many questions you are using. If you have a large number of questions it can be much easier to manage them if you have an individual pool dedicated to each quiz. Individual pools also make it easier to move an individual quiz to another course should you need to do that. On the other hand, keeping track of questions from multiple pools may be confusing and maybe you just want to keep them in one. Keep in mind that questions can also be sorted by categories and keywords (see under question settings).
3.1. What are question settings and why should I set them?
Question settings determine what options you will see when you create a question. For example, if you want to provide feedback for individual answers to a multiple choice test and this option is checked, text fields will be provided for you to type your feedback. On the other hand, if you don’t want to provide feedback, all of those text fields can be annoying to have to scroll past, so you can tell the question settings not to display them.
3.2. Where are the question settings?
When you’re in a pool, it’s the gray Question Settings button in the upper right.
3.3. What do you recommend for settings?
Start with the default settings, then, after you’ve created a few questions, uncheck the options that you never use. You can always go back later and change things.
3.4. Any gotchas?
Oh, yes. You can select question setting from the pool, as well as from the individual tests. They are similar, but there are more scoring options under the ones for tests. If you want to employ negative scoring (making guessing incorrectly have a cost), you’ll want to ensure that “Specify negative points options for answers” is checked at the test level.
4.1. How do I create a question?
When you’re in a pool, click Create Question and select the kind of question you would like.
4.2. Does it matter what I use for a question title?
No. Note that you can have more than one question with the same title.
4.3. What is the Rubrics thing for?
You don’t want to know. Just leave it.
4.4. Do I need to use the categories and keywords?
No, but they are useful in helping you find your questions after you’ve created them. This is a big deal because you can’t actually search for text within questions, so the more questions you have, the more you’ll wish you had used these tags. For example, let’s suppose that you’ve set up questions for two tests. Even if you were clever and prefaced all of your quiz 2 questions with “Q2,” you’d still have to manually go through all of the questions and select them one by one. If, however, you were to create a category called “Quiz2” and apply that category to each of your quiz 2 questions as you built them, you could easily find and select everything tagged with the Quiz2 category. You can apply multiple tags to one question.
4.5. What are instructor notes?
These are notes about the question that instructors leave for themselves, such as notes for revisions of that question. Students can’t see instructor notes.
4.6. What’s the difference between multiple answer and multiple choice questions?
Multiple answer questions allow more than one answer to be selected (checkboxes), whereas a multiple choice question only allows one answer (radio button). The questions often take the forms of “Select all that are true about...” versus “Which one of the following is the best...,” respectively. A multiple answer question typically gives partial credit for every right answer (and punishes incorrect answers), whereas a multiple choice question is all-or-nothing based on the single answer.
4.7. What’s that Update Partial Credit % button?
When you create or edit a question, if you mark the correct answer(s), Blackboard will calculate the partial credit. So, for example, if there are two correct answers in your question, each will be worth 50%. If you click the Update Partial Credit % button, it will refresh that calculation. Therefore there’s no need to go through the question typing 100%, 50%, or whatever in the answer values. Simply mark the correct answers and click the button.
4.8. Is there anything special I should know about multiple answer questions?
Yes. Although you can simply mark correct responses and leave it at that, clever students will realize that there’s no penalty for getting a wrong answer and will check every box to get a perfect score. To prevent this, you need to employ negative scoring, which just means that you put a negative number value for wrong answers (we usually use -15% for each one). However, for this to work properly, you need to do two things. First, before you create or edit the question, you’ll want to ensure that “Specify negative points options for answers” is checked under question settings. Since this option is only available at the test level, you’ll want to set up your questions first, add them to a test, adjust the question settings for the test. Edit the questions, checking “Allow Partial Credit and Allow Negative Scores for Incorrect Answers,” then add the negative values. If those two steps aren’t done first, the question won’t let you submit it with negative values.
Finally, you should be aware of a Blackboard rounding bug. If you have a multiple answer question with three correct answers, each one should be worth 33.3333%. Unfortunately, when Blackboard re-opens a question, as would happen if one made an edit, it trims the last digit, which will not be fixed automatically on submit, and will cause all sorts of complaints from students when they don’t get those fractions of points. Click the Update Partial Credit % button before submitting the question every time and it should behave.
4.9. Can I convert one kind of question to another, like change a multiple choice to a multiple answer?
No. Once a question is created as a certain kind, that kind it must remain.
4.10. Can I use a picture/diagram in my question?
Yes. However, to ensure that the image will still be linked properly the next time the course runs, the best solution is to send the image to your instructional designer, so he or she can store the image outside of the course. For example, an image for a test called “image.gif” for a course in the MET CS department called “CS200” would be saved at:
<img src="/bbcswebdav/courses/00cwr_odeelements/metcs/testGraphics/200/image.gif">To make things easier to remember, we recommend that you name each image the same as the question title (no spaces) concluding with the suffix “q” for question, “a,” “b,” “c,” etc. for the answers and “s” for the solution (feedback). For example, an image for the question part of question Q1_15 should be named q1_15q.gif and its solution should be named q1_15s.gif.
4.11. Can I display equations in my questions without having to use images?
Yes! There are two ways to do this:
The easiest is to use the Math Editor in the text editor. (If the Math Editor button isn’t there, you can add it to the text editor menu by going to the Course Management menu in the lower left Course Management, then Customization, then Tool Availability. Check the box next to Math Editor and click Submit.)
If you would prefer to work directly in LaTeX syntax, you can do that using MathJax.
- In the question text area, click the HTML button. A window entitled “HTML code view” will open.
- Paste the following script link into the HTML code view window:
<script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"></script>- Click the Update button. The window will close and you won’t see anything in the text area.
- Type your item in the window normally, using inline tags of “\(“ and “\)” around each math object, e.g.:
Find the multiplicative inverse to \(-\sqrt{7}\).- To preview how things will look, click the Preview button for the text area on the right.
[As of May 2020, we are looking into allowing direct LaTeX syntax in questions using $$ $$, but there is currently a conflict.]
If your math isn’t rendering, click the HTML button to be sure that the script is there. If it is, try to display something simple like \(x^2\).
Note that MathJax only allows the math functions of LaTeX, so things like paragraph formatting or specialized bullet syntax will not work. When in doubt, test a portion of your work before investing a lot of time in it!
5.1. Finally! How do I build a test?
Under the Course Management menu in the lower left, click Course Tools, then Tests, Surveys, and Pools. Click Tests, then the Build Test button. Give it a name, fill in the other fields if you wish, and submit. This is your empty test. Looks like a good place to put a question set.
5.2. What is a question set?
A question set is a randomized set of questions. For example, you could link 30 questions from a pool to a question set, and then have the question set present each student with 20 randomly selected questions from the 30 in random order, and that each one should be worth 5 points. A question set that displays its number of total questions is the same as just putting individual questions in a test, but they will be randomized in order of presentation (and you can assign the point values all at once).
5.3. How do I make a question set?
In the test (what Blackboard calls a Test Canvas) hover over the Reuse Question menu and click Create Question Set. A window will pop up displaying the questions in your pool. Use the Browse Criteria section to narrow the presented questions. If you set up categories and keywords, you can select your items using them here. As you select questions, the count of selected questions will be displayed in the lower left of the popup window, so you’ll know if you’ve gotten the right number. Click Submit.
Back at the test, inside the question set, you’ll see the number of total questions in the set, the number of questions to display, and on the right where no one ever sees it, the points per question. You can change the last two things by clicking on them and changing their numbers. To use the previous example, you could have put in 30 questions, but only display 20, and make each worth 5 points.
5.4. Can I have more than one question set in a test?
Yes. You can have different question sets for different point values. Some professors like to have 10 question sets, each with three possible questions, each of which displays a single question worth 10 points. This ensures that everyone gets a unique collection of questions for a total of 100 points.
5.5. Can I use question sets and single questions?
Yes. This is useful in situations when you want to ensure that all students must answer a particular question. To add a single question to a test, hover over the Reuse Question menu and click Find Questions. Select a question(s) like before.
5.6. Any more tips?
If you look upper left of the test, it will give you the total points that your test is worth based on your settings. Use this as a quick check that the number questions and their values are correct. For example, if you’ve added that 0-point-essay question where students can submit comments about the test and wondering why your test seems to be worth 110 points, check the value of that question.
6.1. What are test options and why should I set them?
Test options are preferences for how individual tests behave.
6.2. Where are the test options?
Under the menu on the upper left, click Assessments. Click the arrow that appears when you hover your cursor to the right of the test name and select “Edit the Test Options.” (If you don’t see an arrow appear, ensure that Edit Mode is on in the upper right of the page.)
6.3. What do you recommend for settings?
Test Feedback: If the boxes are checked, Test Feedback is displayed to the student immediately upon submission of the test, even if the test result is hidden in the Grade Book. We recommend that you set up a test with the boxes unchecked and only check them when all test have been submitted.
Test Presentation: Checking Randomize Questions will randomize every object in the test. For example, if you want to end every test with a 0-point-essay question where students can submit comments about the test, even if you have it as the last item in the test, if Randomize Questions is checked, it may appear as the first item. If you want to randomize items within a test, it’s much better to use a Question Set.
How do I deploy a test once it has been created?
Go to the Assessments link in the left hand navigation. Under the Assessments tab choose Test. In the Add Test box, select the test that you have already created and would like to deploy and click Submit. On the Test Options screen, select “Make Test Available” and any other release criteria you would like to associate with the quiz and click submit.
7.1. How do I try out a test as if I were a student?
Under Assessments, hover the cursor to the right of the quiz name, click the arrow and select Adaptive Release. Ensure the date widow is current (or uncheck the dates), and under Membership add your username. This way only you can see the test.
If you still can’t get into the quiz, go to the popup menu at the right of the quiz name again, and select “Edit the Test Options” and ensure that “Make the Link Available” is set to Yes under Test Availability.
When you’re done be sure to restore the dates and remove the adaptive release criteria.
7.2. How do copy the text of a quiz into Word?
On the Assessments Page choose “Edit the Test Options” in the dropdown menu next to the Quiz you would like to print. Set “Test Presentation” to “Display all Questions at Once” and click submit. Back on the Assessments page, click on the name of quiz you just edited in order to start the quiz and click begin. The quiz questions will now appear in a list in your browser. Select all and paste into an empty Word document.
Note: This export will not indicate point values or correct answers. If your quiz was originally set to "Display One Question at a Time", make sure to reset it after you have finished copying the text. Also, if your quiz uses Pools for its questions you will need to make sure it is presenting all the questions in the pool for the text copy your be complete.
7.3. How do I make a randomized, printable worksheet?
A randomized worksheet builds on elements of question sets and MathJax. Unlike a conventional downloadable worksheet, since nothing is stored in Blackboard’s content collection, snooping students can’t find them in advance. In addition, since each item is generated from a test question, faculty can randomize the questions that appear on the worksheets.
- Make test questions of the form “File Response.” This requires students to answer the question by uploading a file.
- View the test question as HTML and insert the link to the MathJax library (highlighted in yellow). Follow that with a paragraph containing the question (highlighted in green). Add a line break (
<br>) and then a url containing a link to the worksheet page, a #, and then the question again (highlighted in blue). The url should also include atarget="_blank"attribute to make the worksheet open in a new window.
<script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" type="text/javascript"></script> <p>Find \(\lim\frac{3-2x-x^4}{2x^4-4x-3}\) when \(x\to\infty\)<br> <a href="/bbcswebdav/courses/00cwr_odeelements/bude/worksheet.htm#Find \(\lim\frac{3-2x-x^4}{2x^4-4x-3}\) when \(x\to\infty\)" target="_blank">Make Worksheet</a></p>Note: “%” has to be manually replaced with its HTML entity “%” to transfer. (For more on url encoding, see RFC 3986.
- To randomize which questions appear on the worksheet, create a question set of the file response questions.
7.4. Where can I go for more information?
There’s always Blackboard’s own documentation. If you are building a course with the Office of Distance Education, ask your instructional designer. If you are face-to-face faculty, contact BU’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
