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