bio125 miderm exam

Lockdown broswer need to be installed on department computer everyone time.

Wireless connections should be avoided during exam.

Make sure there are enough ethernet cables in the room.


Section 3:
One student has an error -105 on lockdown broswer. I quitted and submitted the error and quit the lockdown broswer. The student restart and continued her exam. I override her for extra time.
by 10am, some students started open book exam. One forget to exit lockdown broswer, and one did not know how to extract sequences from a ZIP file.  The earlier finishers are 20-30%.

by 11am. Several students finished open book exams.
One student was working on her last question before the exam closed on her. An extra attempt was given.

Section 4:
KA met Lockdown browser multiple times with 20 minutes passed. Paper exam and scantron is given.



Notes from previous exams:

- All phones must be OFF (even "sleep" mode is not enough, we had a couple of alarms going off). All bags and notes left at the front of the room for the closed exam. 

- Give students scrap paper. Ask them to take notes on their scrap paper (not their notebooks - open exam). Collect all paper at the end of exam.

- Ask students to plug in the computers to current and to the ethernet cable. Otherwise, wifi will crash (see below).

- Ask students to run their computers and start their Lockdown browser as soon as they come in. Make sure their lockdown browser is working.

- During my section (pm), during closed exam on Lockdown Browser, internet connection was lost for 75% of the students. We waited while plugging as many of their computers to ethernet cables as possible. In less than 5 min, connection came back, and exam could was taken. During that waiting period: Do NOT touch any button from the lockdown browser as it may block the student altogether. 

- Remind students: "Closed exam: after answering Q40, do NOT click NEXT if you are not ready to submit. Review that you have answered all the questions, then SUBMIT."

- if you need more computers: 

- main computer in the room: log in as bioadmin in the Mac version. ApE and LockdownBrowser should be on the Dock (right).

- Biolaptops (ONLY use Spelmanite wifi): 2 of them work (big pink sign on top "Lockdown Installed OK"), 

section 01 was able to complete under lockdown browser, and use ApE

section 02 was unable to use them for lockdown (message: "problem with the dashboard, ask instructor"), by then everyone else had started so I did not want to change any settings on the exam. I had 2 students take the (printed) exam with scantrons. 20 copies of the printed exam with scantrons are available with Steve, as well as 3 calculators that belong to Dongfang (in case students need them). Open exam and ApE worked well on biolaptops for section 02 as well.

- Both Dongfang and I used the following times for our closed and open midterms:

- closed: 1h 40min (good/fast students finished in 1h)

- open: 60 min (good/fast students finished in 45 min)

- If you have problems call MIT x5400, but it will be more efficient to try to fix the problems yourself with the students or send Steve to get MIT over...

- In many of my students' open exam they were unable to copy-paste the sequences of the primers from the exam... No idea why. It might have been a Mac issue?

From TestGen to Moodle assignments and quizzs

Procedure:
In TestGen, export the questions to Moodle format.

In Moodle, first create an appropriate category. Then choose Question Bank, and then import from file, and move these questions into an appropirate category.
To create a quiz, select the questions from the category.

Note: I have not figure out to convert an entire quiz/exam to Moodle.

Moodle, question modifications

It is much easy to duplicate questions in "Question bank"->"Questions".
Just duplicate the questions and modify one of them.

This seems to solve the question modification headache in the new version of Moodle.

Exam preparation

random seating assignments

label the paper exam and assign to seat
scantrons and penciles (erasers )

extra papers

calculators

video recordings, (google hangout recordings)

Print exam

For online exam,
 timing,
 Check picture quality

During the exam,
Phone must be silenced.
Paper exam should named, scantron should belabeled A or B version of the exam.
Extra paper for sketching

I ran two YouTube live-events using two channels on two computers to monitor the room.

PCAT, MCAT exams

bio125 final exam.

Five students finished the 40-question closed book part in 1 hour.
Most students spent 50-70 minutes on the 12 question bioinformatics section for their first attempt. Student usually spent very short time on their second attempt.

There are 12 questions in the open book part, I set the total score to 10.  I found this mistake after students submitted their answers. I adjust the total score to 12 while students are still taking the exam, the grades are updated and Moodle did not complain.

By 1pm, only 3 students are left.

Moodle, reassign questions to new category

Create new category in "category" tab.

Edit question and resave them as new questions in a different category.

This method can be used to select questions from assignments and generate exams. The questions can be sorted by item analysis.