[Using Sakai] paper exams

[Regan, Alan]

If I was in this situation, I'd likely use the Assignments tool.

Students take a paper-based exam.  My guess is that these paper-based exams are manually graded with hand-written notes.  I would set up a "non-electronic" assignment and use this to share the documents back with the students.

I'd use the "Download All" and uncompress the archive file.  I'd use the "Feedback Attachment(s)" folder to place each student paper for return.  At our university, all of our copiers have built-in conversion to PDF so the prof could run each test through the scanner with any written notes, and attach the resulting PDF documents for each student.  I'd then update the grades.csv file with the overall scores.  If necessary, I could modify the comments.txt file in each student folder as well, writing up the questions, student answer, correct answer, and any notes, but would likely rely on the PDF to do the talking.  I zip up the main folder (not "bulk_download" but the folder with the name of the assignment) and use the Upload All feature to complete the work.

If the Gradebook is using Categories or Categories & Weighting, I could add the assignment to the gradebook but simply associate it into the tests category for the overall gradebook calculation.

I can do all of this without the student doing anything in the class site, so the Assignments tool offers more flexibility.  Tests & Quizzes is designed to administer online exams, so it requires at least one student to actually take the exam before "Scores" are available.  Of course, I can see the logic in trying to accomplish this via Tests & Quizzes.  Another way of looking at it, though, is that an assessment may have the label of "test" or "quiz," but it's an assignment to complete work by a deadline, whether take-home or in-class.

If Assignments seems too complicated, you could also deploy the contrib PostEm tool.  It takes simple .CSV files and displays a row of data for each student. Students see only their own row and all of the data saved for each heading in their row.  The trouble is, PostEm doesn't integrate with the Gradebook.  (It was designed as a basic, free-form gradebook.)  Our hosting partner deployed the tool for us for any unique gradebook requests that would fall outside the standard gradebook tool.

Hopefully there's something here to offer ideas...


-- Alan Regan


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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 14:51:53 -0400
From: Jim Mezzanotte <jmezzanotte at rsmart.com>
Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] paper exams
To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
Message-ID:
        <CAKb9xQu1NKVf2bpqUXphJRUZWi6FDJqFx-_OjNgB-EJcSAMPcA at mail.gmail.com>
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Hi Gregory,

As far as I know, there isn't a way to provide scores/feedback for an
assessment in Tests & Quizzes without students submitting it. But one
approach might be to replicate the paper exam by adding each question
as a "short answer/essay" type.

Students wouldn't need to answer the questions--for example, they
could just enter something like "paper exam submitted" in a single
answer box, and then submit the assessment (you could also just
include an additional introductory question, worth no points, for
students to enter this).

Best,
Jim Mezzanotte


On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 10:14 AM,
<sakai-user-request at collab.sakaiproject.org> wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 16:55:37 -0500
> From: Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at mum.edu>
> Subject: [Using Sakai] Paper exams
> To: "sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org"
>         <sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org>
> Message-ID:
>         <08EF9DA445C4B5439C4733E1F35705BA01F6228C4DE6 at MAIL.cs.mum.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> I never got an answer to this that I think will support our use-case.
>
> We want to have an exam, with 8 questions, on paper, and be able to enter and post the exam scores including individual question descriptions and their score, and some comments on their results.
>
> Exams seem to require online submission by students, but do have the individual question scores and comments.
> But assignments allow offline submission, but do not have individual question components.
>
> Is there an easy way to do this?