We also have used iRATs on Blackboard and have found a 3rd party tool Respondus to do the trick of uploading the questions while retaining a printable copy for the T-RAT in class. Once familiar with Blackboard I have found the uploading relatively simple.
Interested to hear more about changing marks after a succesful appeal, sounds way too tedious to it by hand. I am sure a technical solution can be found!
Best wishes,
Henriikka
_________________________________________________________
Dr Henriikka Clarkeburn
Lecturer
OFFICE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS
Faculty of Economics and Business
Rm 396 Merewether Building (H04)
The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
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From: Team-Based Learning [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alexandra Albright [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, 29 November 2009 4:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Accomodating test-takers who need more time
I have also moved to Blackboard for my law school iRATs. The advantage is that we don’t have to use valuable class time for the iRAT and can go straight to the gRAT. We have a strong honor code at the law school, so I don’t worry about cheating enough to make that a deal-killer. And my RATs are open book (as is the exam)—they tend to be harder questions than most TBL-ers use. I use the RAT to foster discussion in solving the problems as well as getting the basic info learned.
The downside is that we find Blackboard very clunky I have not had a chance to talk to our Blackboard people yet, but some issues are:
1. After a successful appeal, is there an easy way to change the grade on the iRat? So far, it appears that I have to go into each quiz, find out how the person answered the question, and then make the change by hand.
2. When cutting and pasting my word doc into the Blackboard test-maker the fonts got all confused and it was a mess. The second time, I wrote the quiz on Blackboard, but then I could not figure out how to get a reasonable paper copy of the RAT to hand out in class to use during gRATs. My secretary cut and pasted off of Blackboard before class, which is a pain.
3. You have to be really careful to make sure the students are not shown their grade or the statistics after the iRAT. I didn’t hit the right button last quiz, and in the gRAT, I found some students trying to game the statistics to figure out the right answer. It got even crazier because I had miskeyed an answer on Blackboard, so the kids trying to use the statistics were conned into the wrong answer. [I’m also trying to figure out how to deal with that miskeying on Blackboard…]
I would love to hear if any of you have used Blackboard with better results. All in all, unless I can get some answers from Blackboard that make this easy, I’ll have to go back to the scantrons. Maybe hand them out to the students before class.
By the way, my civil procedure class LOVES the RATs. They would really like to have one each week…. They see it as practice for the many multiple choice exams that they face during their law school careers and a way to get early feedback (most law school classes only grade a final exam).
Alex Albright
Univ of Texas Law
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tim Connors
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 2:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Accomodating test-takers who need more time
I have only just recently begun experimenting with TBL but in all my classes I have moved individual quizzes/exams/RATs to Blackboard. I used to worry about cheating by doing this but in the past 4-5 years of doing things things way I have seen literally no difference in the overall scores between taking them in-class or electronically. I would like to attribute this to the first question on all my electronic quizzes, etc., which asks students to verify that they aren't cheating (pangs of conscience) but the more likely reason is that my classes tend to have mostly majors and minors who don't want to risk being caught.
By moving to Blackboard I am able to give the students a larger window during which to take the quiz/exam/RAT (usually 24-36 hours) and I can set the timer for each assignment to accommodate the time-and-a-half some test-takers need. I also have the completion time 30-60 minutes before my class begins so that I can review individual responses before tQuizzes/tRATs.
Tim
Timothy D. Connors
Professor of Theatre
Central Michigan University
Office/Voice: 989-774-3815
Fax: 989-774-2498
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