Illinois Central College Blackboard Blog

Question:
A student contacted her instructor saying that she had completed an exam in Blackboard and then had some trouble with their internet connection when they tried to submit the exam.  When the instructor checked the student’s exam in Blackboard, it showed that she was locked out of the exam and had scored a zero by begining the exam and never submitting any answers.  None of her answers had been recorded in Blackboard. 

Answer:
If you set up your Blackboard exam so that all of the questions are presented at once, on one page, the student’s responses are not automatically saved as they go.  If the browser window with the exam in it is closed before the exam has been submitted, the student’s work will be lost.

There is a save button next to each question when exam questions are presented all at once.   When the student clicks that save button, the answer for that question is saved in blackboard.  If for some reason, at the end of the exam, the exam wasn’t able to be submitted, answers that were not saved are lost, and answers that were saved can be viewed and graded by the instructor.

If you set up your exam so that one question is presented to a student on the screen at a time, each question is saved as the students progress to the next question.  If a student weren’t able to submit their exam in the end for some reason, their answers will have been saved, and can be viewed and graded by the instructor.

If you choose the “Force Completion” option when you are setting up your exam, there isn’t any way to allow a student back in to continue an exam that they partially completed.  You can let them take the test again, but you have to clear their previous attempt before they can start a new one.  This clears out the saved answers from their previous attempt, and they have to start the test from the beginning.

It is possible to lose internet connectivity and successfully submit an exam when the internet connection has been reestablished.  The important thing is that the browser stay open, and that the student doesn’t browse away from the exam. 

Blackboard logs out users who have been inactive for more than 3 hours.  Clicking an answer’s option button on an exam doesn’t count as activity.  Clicking Save on a question, or moving to the next question on an exam presented one question at a time counts as activity.

For lengthy Blackboard exams, you might consider breaking them up into several smaller exams.  Instead of a 100 question exam 1, have four separate 25 question exams, (exam 1 – part 1, exam 1 – part 2, etc.).  That way, if a student doesn’t submit an exam properly, and didn’t save any of their work, they have only messed up on a portion of the exam, instead of the whole thing.