Assessing student work>>Making assessments available
After you add an assessment to a content area, it appears as an item in the gradebook. It is not visible to students, however, until you explicitly make it available. You can make the assessment visible immediately, or make it visible on a date and time you specify. You can also specify a date and time when the assessment will no longer be visible.
Important: Make sure that all question values (such as number of questions, point value, etc.) are set before making the assessment available to students. After a student has taken an assessment, you should only make text edits, for example, to correct typos in the question text. You should not add or remove questions, change point values, add or remove answers or feedback, change file attachments, or change assessment creation settings. For more information, see Modifying assessment questions.
To make an assessment or survey available to students:
Click the course name on the My CourseCompass page.
Click Control Panel.
Under Content Areas, click the link for the content area in which the test appears.
Click Modify next to the assessment you want to modify.
Click Modify the Test options.
Under Test Availability, select Yes next to Make the link available if you want students to be able to view and take the test. Select No to hide the test.
Use the Display After and Display Until options to set assessment availability based on dates and times. For example, you can select Yes for the availability option, but then specify a date and time after which the test is actually visible to students. In this way, you can make tests available according to a schedule. You can also set a Display Until date so the test is only available up to a specified date and time.
Click Submit, then click OK.
Note: For information about the other options on Test Options page, see Modifying assessment options.
You can set dates for when an assessment is visible to students. You can set a Display After date and time, a Display Until date and time, or both.
If you set only the Display After option, the assessment becomes visible after the date and time specified, and it remains visible and accessible indefinitely. For example, you may want to make practice or diagnostic tests visible on a timed basis, according to when you plan to begin new chapters in the textbook.
If you set only the Display Until option, the assessment is visible immediately, but it stays visible only until the date and time you specify. You might give your students a two-day, take-home test that begins as soon as you make the test available, but ends 48 hours later.
If you set both the Display After and Display Until options, the test is visible for the period between the two dates and times. To give a one-hour test on October 3, 2007, you would specify a Display After date and time of October 3, 2007, at 1:00 p.m. and a Display Until date and time of October 3, 2007, at 2:00 p.m.
Here are some key points to understand about assessment visibility and availability:
Be sure to set the Availability option to Yes before specifying display dates.
To set the Display Until option, be sure to select the box to the left of the option as well as select a date and time. Otherwise, the date and time you select will be ignored.
Students have the full time allotted to take the assessment as long as they enter it before the Display Until date and time is reached. So, if you set a one-hour assessment to be available until October 3, 2007, at 2 p.m., a student who enters the assessment at 1:58 p.m. on that day will have a full hour to complete it.
Before an assessment's visibility date has arrived, a message appears below the assessment link in the content area page in the Control Panel. For example, the message might read, Item is not available until after Friday Sep 12 13:00.
When an assessment's visibility has expired, a message appears below the assessment link in the content area page in the Control Panel. For example, the message might read, Item is no longer available. It was last available Tue Sep 16 20:55.
CourseCompass uses the Eastern time zone (US and Canada), which is equivalent to GMT -5:00. To set visibility time ranges, you need to calculate any difference in time zones based on your location.