Tests, Quizzes, and Surveys

Blackboard provides instructors several ways to assess student progress during a course. The following will orient you to basic assessment options:

What is an Assessment?

An assessment is a series of questions an instructor presents to students. The purpose of the assessment can be to evaluate concepts, provide drill and practice exercises, perform opinion polls , or administer course evaluations.

Types of Assessments (there are two assessment options to choose from):

Survey: The survey option creates assessments that record answers anonymously. Use this when you want to perform opinion polls or course evaluations. Survey results are non-graded and anonymous. Official course evaluations are not conducted using this method. Learn more about official surveys here.

Quiz/Test: In the quiz/test option, you can assign point values to each question. Student answers can be submitted for grading, and the results are recorded under each student entry in the Gradebook.
Learn how to create a test of quiz here.

Types of Questions:

Multiple Choice - In multiple-choice questions, you ask a question, and students indicate the correct answer by selecting a radio button. There is no limit to the number of answer choices you can create.

True/False - True / False questions are similar to multiple choice, but have fixed answer options of TRUE and FALSE.

Fill In The Blank - You can also build Fill In The Blank questions, where a student can type a word or series of words into a text field.

Multiple Answer - Multiple answers are similar to multiple choice, except they permit more than one acceptable answer.

Matching - Matching questions are good for items that belong in pairs, such as indicating which word goes with each definition.

Ordering - Ordering questions permit the student to designate a hierarchy for lists or indicate the correct order of items.

Essay - Essay questions are similar to Fill In The Blank questions. You must provide students with a question or statement, and students enter an answer into a text field. Blackboard's software does not grade essay questions automatically as it does for every other question type. An instructor must enter the Blackboard Gradebook and assign points to each essay question. Once this has been completed a final grade can be assigned to the assessment.