Blackboard tests have several components within a course. There are questions, question banks, and the tests themselves. This section provides an overview of these components with the aim of providing a better understanding when it comes to designing your tests. Continue with the rest of this guide once you have understood the basics here.
Learntech often advise staff to begin by building your quesions first. Question banks are a good place to start creating questions. The questions will remain hidden from students until added to a test. You can create mulitple question banks and organise sets of questions throughout them. The question banks area can be accessed from the Details and Actions menu in a course:
Questions can be added to question banks or directly to tests. Combining question banks with tests provides the most flexibility. Creating questions directly within a test can be simpler for basic uses.
Adding a question to a question bank:
Adding a question directly to a test:
As shown in these screenshots, the same question types are available when adding to question banks or directly to tests, except for the 'Add question pool' option. Question pools are used to add a number of questions from a bank to a test.
There are many different types of question available. Nearly all can be automatically marked by the system against the answers you provide when creating them. However, the essay question type will require marking by an instructor user before any marks can be released to students. Please take this into consideration when designing your tests.
A test is the actual content that the students will see in the course. A test can include questions from the question banks in a number of different ways. You can also create questions directly in a test. Tests are where you set the conditions; time limits, start time, and number of attempts, for example. Tests can be added to a course via the 'Create' menu.
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A question pool allows you to define how many questions are pulled at random from a question bank. This can be used to good effect in providing a different set of questions to students. For example, a bank could contain 50 questions with a pool pulling 10 questions at random for each student. It is therefore unlikely that two students sat next to each other would have the same questions to answer. Refer to the next section of this guide which explains some recommendations on using question pools and question banks.
It is possible to create banks of questions to later include in tests. The questions in the banks will only be visible to other instructor users until you explicitly add them to a test for students to take. Question banks have several benefits:
This can allow you to build up your questions directly on Blackboard in stages as you have the time. Questions added to banks can be re-used across multiple tests and copied to other courses. It is beneficial to plan how you would like to group your questions within banks for easier use later on. Some of the main approaches for consideration are outlined below.
A question pool allows you to define how many questions are pulled at random from a question bank. This can be used to good effect in providing a different set of questions to students. For example, a bank could contain 50 questions with a pool pulling 10 questions at random for each student. It is therefore unlikely that two students sat next to each other would have the same questions to answer.
When creating tests using question pools as described above, it is necessary to ensure each student is provided with a similar range of difficulty. This can be achieved with multiple question question banks and question pools. For example, a test could include 5 easy, 5 medium, and 3 difficult questions by adding separate question pools to the same test. Using this method, it is possible to display a limited number of questions from larger banks of question and still make the test fair to all students.
The link below provides detailed guidance on working with Question Banks in Blackboard Learn. Alternatively, please contact your subject's Learning Technologist for more support.
In addition to question pools, questions from banks or from other tests can be added to tests individually, or in blocks, by re-using questions. This creates a copy of each question you select and includes it in the test. Copying questions in this way makes it possible to edit those questions without affecting the ones stored in the question bank or used elsewhere in other tests. It also allows you to alter the points available for each individual question, whereas question pools do not. Note that adding questions this way does mean that all students will receive the same questions, so that particular benefit of using question pools is lost.
The link below will take you to Blackboard's webpage with full details on how to re-use questions within a test.