Background
As an author, you create assignments:
- An assessmentQ assignment consists of one or more parts.
- Each part contains one or more items for the participants to answer.
Types of assignments
There are two types of assignments in assessmentQ:
- Exercises
An exercise is typically used in a formative context. - Exams
An exam is typically used in a summative context.
The main differences between exams and exercises are:
| Exam | Exercise |
|---|---|
| An exam tests the users' knowledge on a certain subject. | An exercise is meant for users to do practice and learn from their mistakes. |
| Users can take an exam only once. | Users can take an exercise an unlimited number of times. |
| By default, exams do not show the correction, feedback, or solution on item level. | Exercises show the correction, feedback, and solution on item level. |
Fixed and on-the-fly item selection
Both for an exercise and an exam you can choose how the items will be presented to the participants:
- Fixed item selection: all items in the assignment are shown to the participants.
- On-the-fly item selection: a selection of the items in the assignment is shown to the participants.
This selection is done “on the fly” in the assessmentQ player. As soon as the participants start their session, the selection of items is done randomly for every participant. If there are enough items in the assignment, every participant can have a different but equivalent variant of the same assignment.
assessmentQ icons
You can recognise the behaviour of the assignment by means of the following icons:
: Exercise. Participants can start an exercise multiple times.
: Exam. Participants can take an exam only once.
: Fixed item selection. All participants will see the same items in the assignment.
: On-the-fly item selection. All participants will see a different selection of items from the assignment.
Use cases on-the-fly assignments
If you create an assignment (exercise or exam) and you don't want to give all participants the same questions, you can either:
- create multiple assignments, each containing a fixed item selection of different but equivalent items. In this case, you need to schedule each variant for a subgroup of your participants.
- create one on-the-fly assignment with a large pool of items. In this case, you can schedule the same assignment for all your participants.
Additional advantages of on-the-fly assignments:
- In the case of practice assignments, the participant can take the same assignment several times and get different questions each time (provided the pool of items is sufficiently large).
- In the case of exams, exam fraud becomes harder for participants as each participant has a different selection of questions in the same exam.
- When you need to reschedule an exam, you can schedule the same exam for the same participant a second time, and he or she will get a different item selection.