4 Recommendations for Previewing Online Assessments in Blackboard

Previewing online assessments before releasing them to students is a very important step with no doubt. It verifies that assessment settings, security settings, and correct answer choices are configured correctly. It also verifies the display of various question types, particularly those with images/equations. Below are 4 recommendations to consider when previewing online assessments in Blackboard.

Recommendations

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1) Use Test Availability Exceptions if students are in the course. You can view the assessment as a student using the student preview account. If students are in the course, you can apply Test Availability Exceptions to make the assessment available to the student preview account only. Do not change the ‘Test Availability – Display After & Display Until’ option to do the testing, as this will make the assessment link available to students. ​View this guide for detailed steps.

Note: For FWAs, SCTLs will be provided with a student demo account which should be used for testing instead of the student preview account.

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2) Take the assessment as a student multiple times. This is to test what different students will see and is more needed when Question Sets are used. ​

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3) Preview all questions. This sounds intuitive, but when Question Sets are used, it is needed to preview all questions from all used pools. ​To do that, you can create a test that contains all questions from all pools and then take that test as a student. This test will be only for previewing all questions and should be deleted afterward.

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4) Answer all questions correctly and not only view the questions. This allows you to notice any error about the configured correct answer choice. After testing is completed, check the grade in the Full Grade Center.